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THE CULTURE OF EKPHRASIS IN AMERICA’S AGE OF PRINT, 1830-1880
by
Christa Holm Vogelius
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirments for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(English Language and Literature)
in The University of Michigan
2012
Doctoral Committee:
Professor Kerry C. Larson, Chair
Professor Sara B. Blair
Professor Julie Ellison
Professor Yopie Prins
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© Christa Holm Vogelius
2012
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The members of my dissertation committee offered sustaining support and productively
varied perspectives to the directions of this project. Thanks to Sara Blair, for her insights
on visuality and the broader field into which art writing enters; Julie Ellison for her
willingness to push my ideas and think creatively about drafts even at their roughest; and
Yopie Prins, for her ability to draw out the strengths and suggest what this project could
be in its ideal form. My deepest thanks go to Kerry Larson, who saw this dissertation
through from its earliest stages, and offered throughout that combination of academic
rigor, critical example, and unflagging support that every student hopes for from an
advisor.
I am indebted to many people and institutions at the University of Michigan and beyond.
Rackham Graduate School at the English Department at the University of Michigan
provided essential funding and support. The American Antiquarian Society and the
University of Nottingham provided generous grants for travel and study. Eliza Richards
at the University of North Carolina and Mary Lou Kete the University of Vermont, who
on their brief visits to Ann Arbor listened to some iteration of this project, offered their
insights and the example of their scholarship. John Fagg and Robin Vandome at the
University of Nottingham read and commented on sections of my third chapter in ways
that have helped me to think about its future forms. Members of the Visual Culture
Workshop at U of M provided helpful feedback on an early draft of my first chapter. Gigi
Barnhill and the staff at American Antiquarian Society offered books, coffee and archival
thrills at a CHAViC summer seminar whose lessons continue to resonate. Anita Isreal of
the Longfellow Historical Site went well beyond the call of duty in her generosity with
her time, expertise and resources. Thanks also to the assistance of the staff at the
University of Michigan Libraries, the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library
and the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
Family and the most familial of friends have been a continuous source of support. Thanks
to Kirsten, Michael, Esben, Kristin and Margrethe for their frank and thoroughly
Scandinavian brand of sanity. The histories and present lives of Edith Vogelius and Inger
and Ove Schwartz are a constant source of inspiration. The Jackson clan has added an
exuberance all its own to my life. And finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Korey
Jackson, my own ideal reader, critic and friend.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..............................................................................................ii
ABSTRACT…………..………………………………………………………………..…v
CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION: EKPHRASIS IN AN AGE OF PRINT…………………..1
Ekphrastic Theory and Its Others…………………………………………9
The Perfect and the Imperfect Copy……………………………………..13
Scenes of Ekphrasis……………………………………………………...20
ONE: LYDIA SIGOURNEY’S DIDACTIC EKPHRASIS........…………….25
Introduction………………………………………………………………25
Disciplinary Intimacy and Sigourney’s Domestic Education……………38
The Familiar and Familial Image………………………………………...44
The Reproduced Image…………………………………………………..63
TWO: “FOLDED UP IN A VEIL”: SOPHIA PEABODY HAWTHORNE’S
FAMILIAL EKPHRASIS AND THE ANTEBELLUM TRAVELOGUE...81
Introduction………………………………………………………………81
Women’s Travel Writing and Its Baggage………………………………86
The Art of the Travelogue……………………………………………….93
Mr. E.’s “Reflective” Muse…………………………………………….100
Sophia’s Familial Ekphrasis……………………………………………109
Conclusion……………………………………………………………...117
THREE: LONGFELLOW, MICHAEL ANGELO, AND THE “MIDDLECLASS” CURATOR………………………………………………………….120
Introduction……………………………………………………………..120
Longfellow at Home……………………………………………………127
The Poetry of Collection ……………………………………………….135
Collecting Michelangelo………………………………..………………146
Michael Angelo’s Open Collection……………………………………..153
Longfellow in Pieces……………………………………………………164
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FOUR: “GAZE ON”: OSGOOD, POE, AND THE VISUALIZATION OF
ANTEBELLUM AUTHORSHIP………………………………………….....183
Introduction……………………………………………………………..183
Pygmalion’s “Golden Age”…………………………………………….191
Early Osgood and the Networks of Print……………………………….194
The “Osgood-Poe Affair”.……………………………………………...203
Pygmalion’s Retrospective……………………………………………..217
EPILOGUE…………..………………………………………………..………232
WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………237
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ABSTRACT
The Culture of Ekphrasis in America's Age of Print, 1830-1880
by
Christa Holm Vogelius
Chair: Kerry C. Larson
This dissertation examines the verbal representation of the visual arts in poetry, prose and
nonfiction works throughout the expansion of nineteenth-century print publishing. The
advancement of print technologies after the 1830s meant that engravings—in books, in
magazines, and as freestanding prints—were increasingly accessible to middle-class
consumers. In turn, genres of writing that worked to describe, critique and expound on
these visual images also proliferated, in forms including travelogues, lyrics, verse drama,
and art criticism. But the literary description of artwork did more than supplement
imagery: it directly confronted developing ideas of authorship in the age of print. This
dissertation highlights understudied ekphrastic works by popular nineteenth-century
writers, arguing that this genre of art description provides unique insight into authorship
and audience in an era of expanding literary production.
Each of the four chapters locates a specific scene in the cultural history of ekphrasis,
using archival and print sources to show the central role that art description played in
defining shifting literary relationships during this period. Precisely at the moment that the
falling costs of image reproduction reduce the pragmatic function of art description,
ekphrasis proliferated to reflect on the new modes of reading that these technologies
allowed. Lydia Sigourney’s ekphrastic lyrics, including “The Last Supper”(1834) and
“Power’s Statue of the Greek Slave”(1854), stress the close bonds between author and
reader, and use imitation as a key term in the relation between artwork, author and
audience. Sophia Hawthorne’s travelogue Notes in England and Italy (1869) balances art
and family description to maintain a distinction between Hawthorne’s personal and
authorial personae. Henry Longfellow’s posthumously published Michaelangelo: A
Fragment (1883) shows the author’s eclectic (and publicly accessible) home art
collection as a model for an inclusive literary mode. And Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny
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Osgood’s exchange of works around the Pygmalion myth trace Osgood’s gradual retreat
from familiar intimacy with her readers.
Through these principal works, this dissertation locates often-overlooked popular
ekphrasis as essential to defining nineteenth-century relations between authors and
audiences.
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Introduction
Ekphrasis in an Age of Print
In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front
of the celebrated ‘Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.’ It shows
what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it
unmoved, and say, ‘Young girl with hay fever, young girl with her head in
a bag’
-Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883 (314).
Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci, a simple, shadowed image of an
adolescent girl looking back at the viewer over her shoulder, was one of the nineteenthcentury’s most popular subjects for ekphrasis, the literary description of a visual work of
art.1 It inspired, among many other responses, a play by Percy Shelley and pivotal
narrative moments in novels by Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this sense,
Mark Twain’s dig at the sentimental labeling of the work also speaks to these ekphrastic
representations, which by the 1880s had become cultural touchstones. Twain, in
suggesting that the unmediated Cenci portrait is only improperly legible to the casual
viewer, hits on the apprehension surrounding the growing presence of mute and
ambiguous images in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, an apprehension to which
ekphrasis as a genre was a partial response. The first part of the nineteenth century was,
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1
This definition of the term ekphrasis (from ek-phrassein, “to speak out, tell”)
includes prose and verse responses to traditional art objects including painting, sculpture
and prints (Scott 1).
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as Henry James writes, “the age in which an image had, before anything else, to tell a
story”— but as the inscrutably bleary-eyed Cenci portrait suggests, the image sometimes
failed (2: 76). Textual labels in the form of ekphrasis as well as other art writing could
correct the interpretive instability of the image by providing a narrative context, however
out-of-proportion to the facts of the image.
In spite of the focus on the museum in much criticism of nineteenth and
twentieth-century ekphrasis, the context for Twain’s sense of the image as reliant on text
can be found most clearly in the American periodical, where the Cenci portrait and many
others like it lived a parallel existence.2 Print culture in the early part of the nineteenth
century seemed to present the picture of text and image as naturally allied “sister arts”
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% The Cenci portrait was one of the most copied paintings of the nineteenth
century, present, as Sophia Hawthorne writes, “in every picture dealer’s shop, in every
size; besides being engraved”(212). See also Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page:
Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (90-96) for “Beatrice” imagery in
antebellum gift books. !
For critical work on 20th-century ekphrasis and the museum, see Barbara Fischer,
Museum Meditations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (2006);
Elizabeth Loizeaux, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (2008); and Willard
Spiegelman, How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry
(2005). All three of these recent works see the museum as the natural backdrop to
twentieth-century ekphrasis, a context that they trace back to “the founding of public art
museums, beginning in the late eighteenth century” (Loizeaux 4). James Heffernan
explores the scope of this development more broadly in Museum of Words: The Poetics
of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993); he locates the gallery as the context that
distinguishes twentieth-century ekphrasis “from its predecessors”: this writing “springs
from the museum, the shrine where all poets worship in a secular age”(138). In Poetry in
the Museums of Modernism (2002), Catherine Paul fleshes out this context, tracing the
influence of one museum or gallery in each of the canons of four British and American
Modernists. But the conflation of the museum and ekphrasis is common even among
writers who do not take the gallery as a primary focus. For instance Grant Scott, in his
study of Keats, calls ekphrasis “the trope of museums and picture galleries par excellence”
(xi).!While public collections were in development by the antebellum period, their
progress was halting and a rich comparative study as Paul’s would be extremely difficult
to undertake for four antebellum writers. See for instance Neil Harris The Artist in
American Society 90-122 on the development of American art academies. !
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perhaps more markedly than ever before. The story of print’s rise— with the
collaboration of the printed image— follows a familiar arc. Technological advances
during the 1830s in papermaking, the cylinder press, and railroad distribution allowed for
a growing and increasingly affordable print culture of periodicals, newspapers, and other
volumes. The quarter-century from 1825 to 1850— what one newspaper called the
“golden age of periodicals”— saw the publication of four to five thousand magazines,
from specialist journals to generalist readers (Williams 32). The most widely-circulated
of these periodicals owed much of their readership to their illustrations, and editors
competed in boasting about the quantity, quality, and general renown of the images that
they obtained.3 Most Americans came into contact with artworks, not through the stillrare public collection, but in “the art gallery of the world” as a contemporary historian
called these illustrated periodicals.4 And with the burgeoning visual culture of these
publications— prominent periodicals like Graham’s and Harper’s printed several
engravings in each issue— came a demand for writers to interpret this work. Art
commentary became a commonplace in magazines, and even pseudo-sciences such as
physiognomy developed in part to aid readers in interpreting meaning in portraiture and
poses.5 Ekphrasis was one component of the “labeling” network that expanded as image
came face-to-face with print.
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& Louis Godey of Godey’s Lady’s Book was among the most outspoken, claiming
for instance that he “lays every good artist he can catch under contribution” and the
magazine’s engravings are” superior in effect to any thing ever given in this country or in
Europe.” See “Visits to the Painters,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 20 (December 1844), 277.
See also Lehuu 109 for the connection between images and profitability at Godey’s.!
'!Frederick Hudson, Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872 (New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 705. Quoted in Sue Rainey.!
(!See for instance Kate Flint The Victorians and the Visual Imagination 14-20.!
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The variety of this network does not typically enter into ekphrastic criticism,
where the precise definition of the term itself is a contentious point. Definitions of
ekphrasis are varied, and to some extent also circular and self-designated. John Hollander
limits the genre to poetry—“Poems addressed to silent works of art”—but includes in his
consideration works addressed to monuments, buildings, or imagined works of art (The
Romantics and Us 130). Mack Smith draws on classical rhetoric in considering ekphrasis
“a digressive description used as an appeal to narrative credibility”(5). And Heffernan
offers the useful, but very broad idea that “Ekphrasis is the verbal representation of visual
representation”(3). Given this existing variety, it seems almost perverse to muddy the
waters with further questions: can travelogues be ekphrastic? What about art reviews?
What about reflections on a genre of artwork? A more appropriate question might be,
why talk about ekphrasis at all in the context of antebellum writing? What pull does the
term have when many antebellum authors did not see themselves as writing ekphrastics
as such, and when much of the writing in this field is only quasi or para-ekphrastic
following all but the most inclusive definitions? The continuing relevance of ekphrasis,
that odd sub-genre that is both absurdly simple and densely theorized, lies in its
traditional critical ties to gender and mimesis. Femininity and the copy are key terms in
the expanding sphere of popular print, and ekphrasis can help us to work out how authors
situated themselves in relation to both at a moment when ideas of authorship—as original
or copied, masculine or feminine—were in fluid development.
The growth of the print market created new readerships along gender and class
lines, and women’s leisure reading in particular saw a rapid expansion (Lehuu 11). From
the beginning of the print revolution, women were associated with the luxury of
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illustration; some contemporary writers referred to all “illustrated magazines,” even those
with clearly mixed-gender audiences, as “feminine” or “lady-literature”(Patterson 93).
Many of the nearly 100 women’s magazines, such as Ladies’ Literary Cabinet (1819),
Ladies’ Magazine (1828), and Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830), that sprang up between 1784
and 1860, were illustrated. The market leader from the 30s through the 60s, Godey’s
Lady’s Book, was famous for its hand-colored fashion plates: its illustrations constituted
the main expense of publication (Lehuu 102; 109). The highly ornamental gift book
annuals of the 20s and 30s created the aesthetic mold for magazines such as Godey’s and
the leading annuals spent from 50 to 60 percent of their budget on binding and illustration
(Mcgill 29; Lehuu 96). A number of the literary works also worked directly to support the
illustrations. It was typical for editors to commission stories or poems to provide a
narrative context or explication for the engravings in a given work. Such low-prestige
“textual illustrations,” as Hawthorne called them, were most often commissioned to
women writers (McGill 30; Patterson 93).
At the same time, the story of antebellum print and image is not one of easy
correspondences. If the growth in the depth and variety of textual culture rode at least in
part on the back of pictures, the alliance was often a begrudging one. Images were often
seen as objects of sensual appeal rather than intellectual or moral comprehension.6
Emerson called illustrated books “the decline of art” and “the dramdrinking of the eye, &
candy for food”(Emerson in His Journals 433). In the decades before the wide
availability of printed images, American readers had become habituated to reading
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)!See for instance Lehuu 4: “Reading matter became a feast for the eye as much as,
and perhaps instead of, food for the mind. The materiality of texts, both verbal and visual,
and the tactile pleasure they warranted contested the well-established authority of the
printed word.”!
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detailed descriptions of artistic genres or styles that they had never— and perhaps would
never— see (Harris 13; 47). The distinction between physical sight and the perception of
the mind’s eye was one that Americans still made, often prioritizing the processes of the
imagination over those of vision. 7 One critic dubbed illustrate books “a partial return to
baby literature” in which “the eye is often appealed to instead of the
understanding”(Holmes 170-71). Even George Graham admitted that he would welcome
“a high-toned magazine with fifty thousand readers…and without the aid of pictures,”
though he considered such a proposition a prospect for the future “as taste improves and
extends”(“Our Portrait Gallery” 96).
The divide between print and image was also pragmatic. The steel engravings
popular from the 20s through the 40s were printed separately from typeset text, and were
many times more expensive to produce (Lehuu 107). And these pictures, even when
anchored in textual contexts, often drifted discomfittingly from narrative meaning.
Readers routinely tore or cut images from the journals in which they appeared, severing
the context or explication which may have accompanied them (Lehuu 103). Many
engravings were “tipped in” at the front of an issue, facilitating such separations
(Patterson 89). Editors likewise reprinted the plates from other magazines, shifting their
textual background (Patterson 80-1). And even where an original poem or story was
expressly solicited to accompany an original engraving, as was often the case with gift
books, subjectivity always threatened the goal of a ‘good’ interpretation. As an author
wrote to the editor of The Gift concerning his textual “illustration” of an engraving by
W.S. Mount, “I trust it will serve in some measure to illustrate your own idea of the
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*!See for instance Kate Flint, esp. 40-93, for the image/imagination split within
Victorian culture.!
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painting. It is, you are doubtless aware, one of the most difficult parts of authorship to
write to a painting …and the chances are ten to one for a failure on his part who attempts
it.”8
In this first part of the nineteenth century, then, text and image are apparently
allied even as they are in many ways fundamentally disconnected. Many textual works
assume a reader’s familiarity with prominently reprinted artworks, but few are illustrated
with the images that they describe. Other texts have unclear visual referents, either
because they fail to name their subjects, or because the literary and visual responses to a
particular artwork are widespread enough that the ekphrasis could be based on a
secondary source. Such confusion of origin was commonplace: in the case of the Cenci
portrait, for instance, inaccurate textual descriptions circulated as freely as bad visual
copies. Neither Shelley nor Melville had seen the original painting in Rome by the time
that they described the work in The Cenci and Pierre; both got the hair and the eye color
of the sitter wrong.9 If ekphrasis is a verbal “reproduction” of a visual work, as one critic
describes it, then ekphrasis in the age of print is a copy continuously dislodged from its
point of origin, a copy in a hall of mirrors (Spitzer 72). Textual mimesis could describe
an original artwork in a museum, an (accurate or inaccurate) print of an original work in a
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8
Grantz American Literary Duplicates Collection, Case 7, Box 31, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania. Quoted in Patterson 87. See Williams 28-32 for an analysis of
this story in the context of ekphrasis and antebellum print culture.
+ Both writers represent dark-haired, brown-eyed sitter as blonde and blue-eyed, a
strikingly common misapprehension in nineteenth-century descriptions of the portrait.
The writers may have relied on copies (many of which were inaccurate or
monochromatic), as Louise Barnett suggests of Melville (173), or they may have based
their descriptions on the faulty descriptions of earlier writers, as James Mathews suggests
(32-34). !!
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periodical, or another writer’s (possibly second-hand) response to an artwork.10 This
disjunction between the singular text and the plurality of its (possible) sources argues for
critical readings that pay attention to the historical contexts in which ekphrastic writing
takes place and is disseminated. Antebellum ekphrastic responses, in aiming in a general
sense to domesticate and verbalize images, render individual “originals”—when they are
retrievable at all—somewhat beside the point.11
This dissertation considers canonical and non-canonical texts through the lens of
ekphrastic close readings and literary historicism. I examine the ekphrastic canons of four
writers long associated genteel feminine audiences— Lydia Sigourney, Sophia
Hawthorne, Fanny Osgood and Henry Longfellow— to draw out the contexts that
informed their textual mimesis. Because of the entrenched association of the copy with
femininity, ekphrasis was for these writers a means of exploring their writing’s
conformity to both of these categories. Often, it was also a means of considering the
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$-!The practice of basing ekphrastic works on other ekphrastic works was not
unique to the antebellum period— for instance, John Hollander notes the relative
frequency of such responses during the Early Modern period— but was encouraged by
increasing access during this era to textual descriptions of artworks (Hollander 5).!
$$!./0!12034"56!57!8/04/09!":;<03!=:;4409>!"6!0?@/9;3"3A;6B!45!8/;4!0C4064!
4/0D!B5A!"3!;6!5@06!560!"6!0?@/9;34"E!E9"4"E"3:F!John Hollander makes the distinction
in his writing on ekphrasis between literary works based on known and extant works of
art (“actual ekphrasis”) and writing about fictional works of art (“notional ekphrasis”(4).
G534!54/09!E9"4"E3!B5!654F!As Jean Hagstrum writes, ekphrasis “is a way of seeing and a
way of speaking that, in its long history, has created conventions and habits of its own
that are sometimes quite unrelated to particular works of art”(xvi). Or W.J.T. Mitchell:
“Even those forms of ekphrasis that occur in the presence of the described image disclose
a tendency to alienate or displace the object, to make it disappear in favor of the textual
image being produced by the ekphrasis” (157 n19). My own failure to make a strong
distinction between the “notional” and the “actual” is much more pragmatic: the
ekphrasis of the antebellum period, which abounds in responses to unnamed, unclear, or
inaccurately described works entirely defies such categorizations.!
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redemption of these same frequently-maligned classes. In an age of increasingly broad
access to ephemeral print, these writers’ reconsiderations of the copy were a means of
considering their own textual copies. Contemporary questions about the morality of
narrative artworks, the mass intimacy of reproduced portraiture, and the potential for
originality in artistic copies centrally motivate these visual descriptions. One of my main
concerns in this dissertation is to highlight the working-out of these historical concerns
through the formal qualities of texts. All of the writers in this project engage with
contemporary ideas around the visual arts through the structure and style of their own
writing, several of them self-consciously. The overlap of these concerns, or the act of, in
Mary Loeffelholz’s words, “bridg[ing] the gap between ‘internal’ formalism and
‘external’ historicism” can help to reconfigure current theories of ekphrasis (4). Much
ekphrastic criticism depends on a binary understanding of the visual and textual, which
either pits the media against each other in (theory-driven) model of competition, or
compares them in an (often formalist) model of analogy. Ekphrastic historicism, in
emphasizing the cultural history of the textual and visual copy alongside of the formal
qualities of texts, can help to dissolve this critical separation.
Ekphrastic Theory and Its Others
An understanding of the place of ekphrastic historicism requires an overview
ekphrastic criticism, a field with ancient roots that has grown dramatically in the past few
decades. Ekphrastic criticism can be broadly divided into two camps: the “paragonal,”
which emphasizes competition between the media, and the “ut pictura poesis” tradition,
which instead emphasizes analogy. The ut pictura poesis is the eldest of the two modes,
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and takes its name from Horace’s expression in Ars Poetica, which translates “as is
painting, so is poetry.”12 The modern standard- bearer of this tradition is Jean Hagstrum,
whose The Sister Arts (1959) has provided a foundation for many comparative studies of
the last few decades. In tracing the ut pictura poesis tradition from its Classical origins
through to the eighteenth century, he argues for the “intimate relationship between
pictorial visualization and total poetic structure”(xviii). Ekphrasis, in other words, can
provide a means of thinking about literary pictorialism more generally, an analogy for a
broader literary practice.
The paragonal stance, on the other hand, operates not through analogy, but
through the construction of a competition that likewise attempts to stage ekphrasis’
broader significance. This criticism has gained traction in the past few years through
writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell and James Heffernan, and can be seen as responsible for
broadening the claims of the genre and staking its relevance beyond, as Mitchell writes,
“a minor and rather obscure literary genre”(152). The paragonal mode has roots going
back to interarts tracts by writers including Leonardo da Vinci and G.E. Lessing, who
stage the relation between text and image as a competition of representational ability, in
which each medium depends on certain fixed characteristics. The basic division made
famous by Lessing in “Laocoön”(1759) is that of the visual arts as spatial and the literary
arts as temporal (Cheeke 22). Each medium also possesses a constellation of associated
characteristics, not all of which neatly align: the visual arts in this comparative mode are
also associated with silence, passivity, and most strikingly, femininity. Such gendering is
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12
Cheeke 21. But the tradition of analogy between poetry and painting goes back
even further: Plato in the Republic famously associates painters and poets as conspirators
in falsity, and Aristotle links the two more positively in the Poetics (Hagstrum 3-9).
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“a commonplace of the [ekphrastic] genre,” and has come to take a central place in the
analyses of many critics (Mitchell 168).
But the gendering of the media—the male verbal subject speaking for the silent
female object—as a defining characteristic of the ekphrastic encounter begs questions of
the works examined within the paragonal canon. This criticism tends to mine a limited
canon of ekphrasis, particularly writing by male Romantic or Modernist poets, which
lends itself well to both the division of gender and the idea of artistic self-assertion in the
paragone. Mitchell frames the literary mode as a confrontation with “otherness”—
particularly sexual and racial difference— but centers his argument in familiar canon of
poets including Keats, Shelley, and Williams. Heffernan, who makes the idea of a
“gendered antagonism”(7) central to his study, mentions a female poet only once in a
study that spans from antiquity to the twentieth century. Grant Scott, in his work on
Keat’s ekphrasis notes that “For Keats, more than for the other Romantic poets, the
competitive elements in ekphrasis emerge in terms of the battle of the sexes rather than as
any conventional aesthetic battle” a state toward which his “wariness about contemporary
female writers” contributed (xiii-xiv). Murray Krieger, whose 1967 essay on ekphrasis
and later book-length study were influential to Mitchell’s work in particular, takes on the
dynamics of the gendered encounter in his own writing, which he calls an “ekphrasis of
ekphrasis” and in which he describes encountering ekphrasis as “a maddeningly elusive
and endlessly tempting subject.”13 Mitchell anticipates concerns about the limited scope
of this criticism, labeling his framework in “Ekphrasis and the Other” as “a fragment or
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Krieger xiv, 1. See Grant Scott, who compares Krieger’s response to ekphrasis
to Keats’ encounter with “the unravished Grecian urn”(xiii). Krieger himself calls
ekphrasis a “marriage.” In an odd echo of this idea, the illustrations to Ekphrasis: The
Illusion of the Natural Sign are the work of his wife, Joan Krieger (22).!
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miniature” and admitting that the analysis “would look quite different of course, if my
emphasis has been on ekphrastic poetry by women”(181).
For a sense of how a reading of ekphrasis can “look different,” we need only to
turn to critics working within canons that challenge these particular boundaries of
interpretation. In the past few years, a number of works that question some of the basic
assumptions of the paragonal stance of interarts criticism have emerged. Gender in
particular has been a point of contention; the idea of text as masculine and image as
feminine, is, as one critic writes, “a paradigm which seems always open to question and
often to parody”(Cheeke 6). The essays of In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry
from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler (2009) tend to take what the editors call a more
“iconophilic” stance, basing their analyses more closely on the model of ut picture poesis
(Hedley 26). Some essays represent the writers as consciously rewriting the gendered
dynamic of earlier ekphrastic work; all the essays see the visual arts as a means of
reflecting on “the resources of her own artistic medium”(35). In Between Literature and
Painting: Three Australian Women Writers (2002) Roberta Buffi argues that the
contemporary writers she examines resist the standard gendering of the Laocoön, in part
by casting the works women artists in their ekphrastic reflections. And Susan Williams
argues that her canon of antebellum prose ekphrasis expresses “less a desire to overcome
a feminized ‘other’ than a nostalgic attempt to combine form and content, sign and
referent,”(33) a means of stabilizing widely reproduced portraiture.
My project brings together aspects of much of this earlier work within the canon
of antebellum American writing on art. If the key term in paragonal criticism is
“difference” and the key term in ut pictura poesis is “analogy,” the guiding light in this
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dissertation is the copy, a term that brings together both difference and sameness. The
idea of the “sister arts” as following analogous goals and methods was alive and well in
the early nineteenth-century: one need only turn to Samuel Morse’s lectures on painting
and the other arts or Washington Allston’s ekphrastic poetry for evidence of this view.14
At the same time, print, the very context that seemed to bring text and image together
often had an unbalancing effect. The greater economic value of the image, and its
tendency to become separated from its textual environment, inspired written responses
that worked to anchor the meaning of the image and limit its interpretation. For the four
antebellum writers that I address in this dissertation, the distinctions between text and
image inspire their ekphrastic work, even as their writing also creates its own analogies
between terms. These writers’ larger canons are all in some way associated with imitation
or mimesis, and so ekphrasis, a quintessentially mimetic writing, is a particularly
productive terrain for working out the potential for imitation in writing more broadly. At
a point when copying and imitation were increasingly deprecated in their association with
femininity, this canon provides a rare means of theorizing the copy in a positive and
productive sense. The cultural conception of the copy— in education, the visual arts, and
literature— is an essential backdrop to the ekphrasis of this period.
The Perfect and the Imperfect Copy
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14
See Samuel Morse, Lectures on the Affinity of Painting and the Other Fine Arts,
ed. Nicolai Cikovosky , Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983); and
Washington Allston, Lectures on Art and Poems, ed. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (New
York: Baker and Scribner, 1850). Morse considers both painting and poetry as
“intellectual” arts (112). The principle for the arts that Allston outlines in Lectures can be
applied to both his painting and poetry, including his ekphrastic poems.
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The act of copying is a recurrent and distinctly feminized trope in antebellum
culture, entering into both visual and literary practices, and seeming to reverse the
paragonal construction of ekphrasis in which the male text “reproduces” the feminine
image. In the antebellum period, women, not men, were most trained in and associated
with the act of copying. These associations, while not unambiguously negative, did
delimit the borders of women’s creativity during an era when ideas of authorship and
originality were rapidly developing. The language beginning to circulate around
authorship— including terms such as authenticity and fraudulence, plagiarism and
originality—enmeshed the ostensibly neutral idea of mimetic reproduction within a
charged context. The copy, then, opens up a rich network of meaning for the writers
examined in this dissertation, all of whom are caught up in the reiterative properties of
their writing. In fact, the thematic concerns with copying represent a sub-genre of
antebellum writing that has been under-explored relative to literary historical genres such
as sentimentality.
A range of women’s writing practices in the antebellum period, whether
professional or amateur, published or not, fall under the broad rubric of copying.
Women’s education in what Claire Badaracco calls “that last generation of the women of
pre-industrial American society” was dedicated in large part to both textual and visual
copying: “‘reading’ was commonly understood to mean elocution, ‘composition’ was
making copies, and ‘writing’ was primarily an exercise in journals and copy-books”(96,
italics Badaracco). Leisure writing likewise often centered on reiterated text. Writers of
commonplace books and journals frequently copied published poems and literary
passages next to the their own text, weaving “found material into something new” (Kete
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“Reception” 27). The published gift books that began to appear in the late 1820s were
both modeled on these personal modes of album-keeping, and in turn served as models of
taste and organization for this continuing practice (27). And professional women writers
often took on the task of compiling passages wholesale from other works, to create
educational compendiums for school or home education. In the context of this
recreational and professional copy-work, critics have evaluated even those women
writers— such as Emily Dickinson— who were once seen as cultural anomalies, through
this influential practice.15
Artistic copying was another component of antebellum women’s education that
became associated with femininity in a broader context. Many schools encouraged the
practice to develop the eye, and though the majority of professional engravers and
copyists in the nineteenth century were male, the act of visual copying was strongly
associated with femininity. Most literary and artistic depictions of copyists, for instance,
focused on women. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hilda in The Marble Faun and Henry
James’s Noémie in The American are well-known American examples, but a fixation on
the the female copyist was also a broader European phenomenon. It infiltrated midcentury accounts of the Louvre as well as French and English literature, pictures by
George Du Maurier as well as Winslow Homer (Briefel 35-45). A central component of
this association was the connection of women to the democratizing context of education
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15
For women writers and the practice of “compiling”(141) composite volumes for
publication, see Marion Rust, “‘An Entire New Work?’: Abridgment and Plagiarism in
Early U.S. Print Culture” (2011).
For discussion of Dickinson’s writing in relation to women’s hand-crafted books and
copying practices, see Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The
Soul’s Society (1984) 1-38; Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric
Reading (2005); Alexandra Socarides, “Rethinking the Fascicles: Dickinson’s Writing,
Copying, and Binding Practices” (2006). !
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rather than the (implicitly masculine) sphere of invention. As John Ruskin wrote to a
young copyist of Turner: “I hope you will persevere in this work. Many women are now
supporting themselves by frivolous and useless art; I trust you may have the happiness of
obtaining livelihood in a more honorable way by aiding in true educational efforts, and
placing within the reach of the general public some means of gaining better knowledge of
the noblest art”(qtd. in Briefel 35-6). Feminine efforts at originality may have been
“frivolous and useless,” but the task of copying performed a useful if only secondary
educative function of disseminating the “noblest art” that women could not themselves
produce.
Implicit in many accounts of female copyists, however, was the idea of the
feminine copy as superficial, based in the body rather than the mind or spirit. Female
copyists in nineteenth-century literature, Aviva Briefel argues, are marked by a “striking
physical appearance”— often one that clearly deviates from bourgeois femininity— and
the implication “that there is nothing behind her facade”(37; 52). Her copy-work is
similarly coded: it may adequately reproduce external forms for general education, as
Ruskin encouraged, but it lacked the deeper artistic sense that for instance allowed the
good forgery to be mistaken for an original work.16 It was not mimesis, but mimicry.
Similarly, women writers were often represented as capable— extraordinarily
adept, even— at copying external forms, but lacking in the power of original intellectual
reflection. Rufus Griswold, an editor and anthologist whose career to a large extent
depended on the women writers whose work he promoted, was a prominent voice of this
perspective. As he wrote in the introduction to The Female Poets of America (1849): “It
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16
Briefel 35, 43. The forger is, on the other hand, both an “unexpectedly admired
progeny of the nineteenth-century culture of art” and “exclusively male”(20; 32).
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is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in
men…The most exquisite susceptibility of the spirit, and the capacity to mirror in
dazzling variety the effects which circumstances or surrounding minds work upon it, may
be accompanied by no power to originate, nor even, in any proper sense, to reproduce”(8).
In the context of the larger passage, Griswold implies that “reproduction” or mimesis, in
its “proper sense” requires the work of the intellect, while emotion is the prime mover of
women’s poetry. This reliance on sentiment means that feminine attempts to “mirror”
others’ thoughts do not produce perfect copies, but rather mimicry, a sort of skewed
reflection of a “dazzling variety.”
Considerations and reconsideration of the sentimental mode within modern
criticism have likewise centered, in varying ways, on the idea of authenticity.
Sentimentality’s place in the larger nineteenth-century literary canon is one that since the
Douglas-Tompkins debate of the 70s and 80s has been characterized by the vocabulary of
original and copy, genuine and fake. In Ann Douglas’s famously polemical argument, the
terms by which she characterizes the genre— as “camp” and “fakery”— clearly stakes
the battle as one between authenticity and its opposite (4-5; 12). Jane Tompkins reads this
same canon through a reconstruction of its contemporary political and historical
significance, explicitly reversing the value of the terms of Douglas’s argument without
dismantling them: “My own embrace of the conventional led me to value everything that
criticism taught me to despise: the stereotyped character, the sensational plot, the trite
expression. As I began to see the power of the copy as opposed to the original, I searched
not for the individual but for the type”(xvi). More recent critical evaluations have
complicated characterizations of the genre, among other things by opening up its
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exclusive connection to women writers, but the terms of copy and authenticity remain in
the background of many such readings. Mary Louise Kete, for instance, argues that
sentimentality has worked as a “utopian force,” one of the nineteenth century’s most
persuasive means of forging “a cohesive group identity encompassing and defining the
American middle class”(xviii; 9). But this focus on identity-formation often emphasizes
the mode’s manipulative properties. Sigourney and Longfellow, for example, use “the
rhetorical strategies of sentimentality to coerce their readers into joining with them in the
in the articulation of a shared vision of America”(8). Sentimentality is the appearance of
authentic emotion used as a “subtle and powerful tool” in a larger intellectual project
(122). The mode has had a hard time escaping the sense of its own duplicity. Rather than
relegate concerns over the copy and authenticity to backdrop status within the
increasingly ambiguous and ambivalent sub-category (or moral philosophy, or hegemonic
cultural discourse) of sentimentality, I bracket the genre-term in order to put the copy into
relief as a literary concern in its own right.17
Recent critical work has begun to highlight the cultural importance of mimicry
and the act of copying in antebellum writing. The early decades of the nineteenth century
saw the traditional ‘craftsman’ model of creative work coming into contact with notions
original and proprietary authorship.18 But as critics such as Lara Langer Cohen and Eliza
Richards remind us, this notion of originality was never as simple as a retrospective
glance may suggest. Cohen sees the antebellum period’s predilection for critical puffery,
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17
I paraphrase Joanne Dobson: “With the accelerating recovery of nineteenthcentury women's writing, sentimentalism has been approached as a subliterature, as a
moral philosophy, and as a hegemonic cultural discourse" (264). Since Dobson’s writing
in 1997, the possible meaning and canons encompassed by the term have only grown.
18
See Rust 142. !
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literary hoaxes, and rampant accusations of plagiarism as a part of a larger sense that the
developing American literature itself could be nothing more than “fraudulence”(1). But,
she posits, the culture of mass-produced print, rather than destroying the original, as in
the Benjaminian construction, may have created the first sustained idea of it: “It is the
conceivability of the derivative that is the prerequisite for imagining, and privileging the
authentic”(16). And if originality is, as she writes, a “second-order phenomenon,” it is
also, as a term, inherently unstable. Richards suggests a similar instability in her study of
Poe and the poetesses of his literary circle; she notes that these writers “decline to enforce
or accept a clear division between original and copy, genius and mimicry, poet and
poetess” and “retain skepticism about the possibility of true mimesis,”(20) finding a
productive ground in the space between these terms. The functions of “lyric mimicry”—
“echo, quotation, paraphrase, repetition” — are, Richards argues, essential to reading the
social, cultural and aesthetic work of the lyric during this time (25).
But if the impossibility of mimesis haunted antebellum poets and fiction writers,
it would seem to twice plague those among them who wrote ekphrastic works. The
impossibility of translating visual to textual is a truism of ekphrastic theory and cultural
theory alike. (As Mitchell memorably puts it, “Words can ‘cite,’ but never ‘sight’ their
objects”(152)). Ultimately, then, ekphrasis is always a form of “fakery,” a genre that
“exists and thrives under the knowledge of failure”(Cheeke 2). If perfect mimesis of a
text is only plagiarism and perfect mimesis of an image is only a forgery, then antebellum
ekphrasis stakes itself on a double-failure. Twain’s prod at the Cenci portrait expresses
such failure clearly. The portrait, over which so much nineteenth-century ink was spilled,
intrigued viewers for its connection to both a Renaissance master, Guido Reni, and the
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scandalous Roman narrative of the Cenci family, which entwined murder, incest and
capital punishment. Since the end of the nineteenth century, though, both the work’s artist
and its subject have been widely discredited, shown to rest on little more than wishful
thinking. The artwork is no longer included in authoritative accounts of Reni’s work and
its sitter remains mysterious, though less intriguingly so. The many ekphrastic accounts
that revolve around the emotional salience of the Cenci narrative are in a very literal
sense wrong, and contemporary viewers, who no longer flock to see the work as one of
the central Roman shrines, are much more likely, in Twain’s words, to “inspect it
unmoved.” But such was precisely the power of early nineteenth-century ekphrasis: at a
point when few readers were attuned to interpreting images, it provided them with the
emotional language to do so— or to believe that they could. That this ekphrastic language
tells us less about antebellum imagery than about antebellum authorship is an argument
for its significance rather than its failure.
Scenes of Ekphrasis
There are many authors from this period, both well-and lesser-known, whose
writing centers on issues of artistic description and mimesis. Melville authored a number
of ekphrastic poems and passages; he responded to painting as well as sculpture, and in in
Battle-Pieces was one of the first nineteenth-century writers to offer sustained meditation
on photographic reproductions (Hollander 67). His late-career lectures on Greek statuary
show an understanding of the analogies between the literary and the plastic arts, and his
preoccupation with the act of copying in a sculptural context suggests itself for a
comparison to his literary work (Maloney 1-5). Margaret Fuller was a pioneering art
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critic of both American and European work, whose contributions to ekphrasis in Summer
on the Lakes (1843) and other works have been understudied. Christopher Cranch, a
figure often seen as peripheral to Transcendentalist circles, was in fact central where
conceptions of visuality were concerned. His literary relationship to Emerson,
particularly in the context of his own painting and ideas of imitation, deserves more
attention.
That said, the authors that I have chosen to work with in this dissertation do share
common ground that argues for their consideration as a group. They were all popular and
generally prolific writers known for their ekphrastic writing. As influential authors, their
ekphrastic work reached a broad readership and participated prominently in public
dialogues around the visual arts. And equally importantly, as popular authors, their
descriptions of widely reproduced imagery obliquely reflects on their own widespread
reproduction, and on their own relation to an audience. While aiming to avoid ahistorical
constructions that would see in early nineteenth-century works a conscious selfreflexivity, I argue in this dissertation that art description is an ideal means of accessing
changing relations between readers and texts. The authors in this project are
constellations in a web rather than the beginning and end of the story, but their literary
prominence means that they are sound models through which to think about reading
practices.
My first chapter, “Lydia Sigourney’s Didactic Ekphrasis,” considers the ekphrasic
poetry of one of the most popular writers of the period in light of contemporary ideals of
education and the arts. Sigourney’s ekphrastic poetry, I argue, is directly indebted to the
democratization of art instruction in the 1830s and 40s, which concretized the place of
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the fine arts in middle class moral education. Drawing manuals emphasizing creative
reproduction of imagery as a means of moral education inform these poems, which stress
the speaker and the reader’s emulation of the artistic image as a means of consuming its
lessons. They emphasize the artwork as reproduction and variation rather than a static
object to be described or overcome, finding in aesthetic transformation an allegory for the
empowering effects of home education.
In my second chapter, I look to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s travelogue Notes in
England and Italy (1869) as a work that makes surprising claims for mimicry and
ekphrasis alike in relation to women’s writing. In the context of Hawthorne’s work as an
editor and painter-copyist, my analysis of Notes highlights her fixation on the visual and
verbal copyists that populate the Italian landscape of the Hawthorne family’s travels. Her
discussion of these artist-copyists clearly challenges the notion of artistic originality as
absolute aesthetic independence. At the same time, the travelogue is a public document of
private memories, both preserving family history and presenting a veiled public façade.
In the act of this veiling, the apparently derivative act of literary copying—recording
detailed descriptions of artworks—becomes innovative, blurring the line between the
faithful imitation and the literary original. Hawthorne’s consideration of artworks and
artists, as well as her editorial treatment of her own text, suggest a perspective through
which both the visual and the verbal copy come to represent creativity.
Chapter Three, “Henry Longfellow, Michael Angelo, and the Middle-Class
Curator” examines the poet’s dramatic poem Michael Angelo: A Fragment in light of
Longfellow’s aesthetic ideals as an art collector. A writer who Margaret Fuller dubbed a
“middle class” poet, Longfellow confronted accusations of plagiarism, effeminacy, and
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simple mediocrity throughout his career. In Michelangelo—published posthumously, but
begun early in his literary career— he found what he considered an analog for his own
writing practice. Longfellow’s Michelangelo is an artist whose work, like the poet’s,
implicitly questions the dichotomies of masculine and feminine, original and derivative,
high and low. And like Longfellow’s own home art collection, the dramatized Michael
Angelo is an eclectic space that brings together extremes of elite and popular, fine art and
artisanship. In so doing, the epic poem imagines the instability associated with “middle
class” artists as productive rather than problematic.
My fourth and final chapter, “Gaze On!: Osgood, Poe and the Visualization of
Antebellum Authorship” examines the work of Fanny Osgood, a writer best known for
her public literary exchange with Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s. This exchange— echoing
lines, formal structures, and broader thematic concerns of Poe’s poetry— is characterized
by the literary imitativeness for which Osgood is known today. But I argue that this echogame is only part of the story of her literary production, which was centrally concerned
with the ability of the reproduced text and image to come to life for an antebellum
reading public. Osgood represents this ‘coming to life’ through her poetic
reinterpretations of the Pygmalion myth, a popular archetype for nineteenth-century
writers. The myth tells of the story of the sculptor, Pygmalion; his statue, Galatea; and the
love that, along with divine intervention, brings Galatea to life. The ties between love and
sight are central to the narrative, but in Osgood’s hands, this emphasis on visuality
becomes suspect—a sign of idolatry— and is trumped by the ephemeralities of voice,
song, and lyric. This stress on voice over image suggests that locating Osgood within a
traditional narrative of print culture presents only a partial image of her performance-
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based work. The innovations of these Pygmalion poems point toward the other media—
including the late-career setting of her work to music—that can inform a fuller reading of
this canon.
As a unit, these four chapters call up specific scenes in the cultural history of
ekphrasis, and tell a small part of a complex and ongoing story. The fifty-year period that
this dissertation takes on is one in which visual art in America existed predominantly in
print. This period emerges from an era in which art prints were much less ubiquitous, and
art descriptions as likely to be based on firsthand encounters with original artworks or
personal relationships with artists. It ultimately leads into the age of the American
museum, a period beginning at the end of the nineteenth century with the founding of
numerous seminal public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum in New
York and the Art Institute of Chicago. Ekphrastic work from this period and from the
early twentieth century more often than not took its inspiration from such public
collections.
Just as the historical shifts in these earlier and later periods clearly make their
mark on the art description of the times, so is the ekphrasis of nineteenth-century print
influenced by the circumstances of its composition. It is in the age of print that we see the
most insistent juxtaposition of text and image, and this correspondence strengthens the
long-standing analogy between the two media. During this time, an author’s response to
an image almost inevitably summons a reader’s relation to their text. Though the early
nineteenth century is the era in American ekphrastic writing that has received the scantest
literary-historical attention, it is, as I hope to show, the one that can provide the most
insight into significant shifts in the relation of authors to their audiences.
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Chapter One
Lydia Sigourney’s Didactic Ekphrasis
Drawing, the simplest of languages, is understood by all.
-Rembrandt Peale, Graphics; a manual of drawing
and writing, for the use of schools and families
(1835).
Introduction
That the antebellum public framed artistry in terms not of the static original art
object, but a more flexible formulation of artistic poses, capable of being infinitely
modulated, is nowhere more evident than in the vogue for a democratically fashioned
approach to art instruction. At its height in the 30s and 40s, the approach left its mark in
the form of inexpensive drawing manuals, passages of drawing instruction in popular
periodicals, and sections of conduct books such as Lydia Sigourney’s Letters to Young
Ladies (1833), wherein she praises drawing for its practical moral benefits:
A taste for Drawing heightens the admiration of Nature by enforcing a closer
examination of her exquisite workmanship, from the hues of the wild flower, to
the grandeur of the forest, and the glowing beauties of the extended
landscape….Those who make such advances in Drawing and Painting, as to be
able to sketch designs and groups from History, derive high intellectual pleasure,
from this elegant attainment.”(110-111).
This consideration of the arts as a means toward “intellectual pleasure” contributed, like
many other writings of this period, to bringing the fine arts to a popular and often female
audience. While many authors spoke of drawing from nature, one element that separated
this period’s thoughts on arts instruction from those of the late eighteenth century was
precisely the assumption that readers would initiate or supplement their drawing practice
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by copying engravings from books or periodicals or by looking at works from within the
family sphere. In turn, the democratization of drawing practice was seen as a training
ground for reading these same images; as the visual arts became increasingly accessible
through reproduction and commercially accessible originals, they required a more
visually savvy viewing public. Drawing, writers maintained, had the ultimate goal of
training the eye to see the very type of image that the hand produced (Korsmeyer 509520).
Sigourney’s ekphrastic poetry emerges from this artistic environment, and like the
drawing manuals of the same period, functions as a training ground for the interpretation
of a fluid and dynamic visual culture. These poems see artworks not as distanced high
cultural objects, but as scenes to be studied for desirable ends such as “intellectual
pleasure” or “heighten[ing] the admiration of nature”; they see art as a conduit toward the
same aims, both moral and intellectual, as a middle-class education. The images that they
draw on are broadly accessible: either unnamed images that are clearly familiar types
from print culture, or specific pieces that were widely reproduced. This ekphrasis and
follows a new conception of art in the antebellum period, one that understands art not as a
part of the elite “ornamental” education of the Republican era, nor as part of the highcultural space of the late-century gallery, but as an essential part of an educational model
that emphasizes emotional exchange and social networks. At precisely the time when
technological reproduction of imagery seemed to render ekphrasis redundant, it became a
newly valuable medium, one more about the act of viewing—how to approach images,
what to draw from them, and what to avoid—than any particular aesthetic.
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None of Sigourney’s poems derive from a museum environment, a telling fact
both for her own canon and for middle-class art culture at large. Sigourney was uniquely
positioned to write an ekphrasis of the emergent gallery. Though she had little access to
original art in her childhood, her friendship with her father’s employer, and later this
employer’s grand-nephew, Daniel Wadsworth, granted her opportunities to experience a
developing museum culture firsthand. Wadsworth was one of America’s first wealthy
patrons of the art, and it was at his home that Sigourney “first enjoyed the luxury of
studying fine pictures”(Letters of Life 90). Wadsworth also secured Sigourney a teaching
position in his hometown of Hartford and the publication of her first volume, Moral
Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815) (Letters of Life 89; 202; 325). In the 1840s, Wadsworth
was the benefactor behind the Wadsworth Athenaeum, one of America’s first public art
museums, built in Hartford, where Sigourney lived for most of her life.19 Sigourney
mentions the Athenaeum in her late-life autobiography as an institution with which her
readers would be familiar, but it made remarkably little impact on her ekphrastic canon
(90). The art collection included mostly American historical canvases, as well as
Wadsworth’s collection of works by Thomas Cole and Thomas Sully, bequeathed after
his death in 1848. None of these works or artists appears in Sigourney’s poetry, which
drew primarily on genre scenes and well-known reproductions of European works. This
absence testifies to the limited impact of public collections on Sigourney, and likely also
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19
The other was the Trumbull Gallery at Yale University, which opened in 1832,
displaying paintings by John Trumbull and Samuel Morse, among others. By 1843, the
gallery was “a more or less dead institution.” See Orosz 149-151.
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on her broadly middle-class audience. In fact, the Athenaeum did little to foster public
education and postured more as a “shrine of the muses” than a “palace for the people.”20
The more accessible sources of Sigourney’s ekphrasis suggest an entry into both
her poetic canon as a whole and the foundations of antebellum ekphrasis. In looking at
antebellum illustration and artwork, critics have tended to focus on the moral content of
these images and the messages that they promoted to an increasingly visual-literate
reading public.21 Likewise, Sigourney criticism has been heavily weighted toward the
ethics and morals that the poetry does or does not advance.22 Sigourney’s ekphrasis
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20
Orosz 155. See Orosz 149-155 for an account of the founding of the
Athenaeum.
21
See for instance Lehuu 102-25.
%%!The sense of Sigourney’s writing as a dematerialized moral “phantom
voice”(Wood) appears first in early criticism but lingers into more recent writing.
Sigourney herself encouraged the conception in discussing her writing in Letters of Life
as a disembodied activity, set apart from daily life, and marked by the visitation of a
muse. Ann Wood, writing in 1972, argues that Sigourney created a poetic image of
herself in which “she was an inhabitant of her own inner space and owed her inspiration
solely to its resources.” More recent and nuanced work often maintains an idea of
Sigourney that depends on its distance from physical life; in Eliza Richards’ nuanced
study of mimicry in the poetess tradition, for instance, Sigourney embodies “the
insatiable longing for a dead infant” (169) and “confronted the association of women’s
writing with sexual indiscretion by specializing in the elegy and draining bodies of
animation”(71). The sense of Sigourney as an elegist and proponent of abstracted
moralities such as “duty, dedication and loyalty”(71) permeates this and other recent
conceptions of the poetess. !
Even in criticism which has resisted a focus on morality, a focus on content over form
nearly always lingers. Nina Baym’s influential “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney” critiques
what she sees as Wood’s simplistic “construal of Sigourney’s death poetry”(389) and
focuses her attention instead to what she considers a more significant portion of the
poetess’s canon, her history poems. Mary Loeffelhoelz shifts the focus once again, as she
sees the poetess’s canon as shaped intimately by her early role as schoolteacher and the
domestic tutelary complex. Paula Bennett similarly focuses on the political, locating
Sigourney as a “difference feminist” who legitimated feminine involvement in the public
sphere from a location of moral domestic authority. Dorothy Baker takes the converse
approach and reads Sigourney’s domestically-situated poems—such as “To a Shred of
Linen”—as legitimations of the feminine sphere, that work by embuing this sphere with
historical and mythical significance. In all of these accounts, the push to bring
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provides an opportunity to investigate what the first of these readings have taken for
granted—the changing place of visual art in Americans’ lives, and the effect that these
shifts had in the public’s approach to art during this period—while providing a sense of
Sigourney as a writer concerned with process and form, not merely didactic moralism.
From her first volume of poetry in 1815 to her last in 1862, Sigourney wrote at least 13
poems easily identifiable as ekphrastic, not including the several more that focus on
directions to an artist in the composition of an artwork (what John Hollander calls
“imperative” ekphrasis), the verse meditations on art-objects interspersed in the
travelogue Pleasant Memories from Pleasant Lands, or the poems to American
monuments.23 Sigourney’s ekphrastics all contain some reference to a “picture,” painting,
or sculpture in their titles. All refer to a particular image that was widely reproduced, or a
type of image to which readers had ready access, rather than the more remote scenes from
the still-emergent American galleries or lesser-known European churches. These poems
focus on genre scenes familiar from gift books and periodicals, the family portraits that
hung on walls, and the widely-circulated engravings of “masterworks.”
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Sigourney’s writing into a larger world of poetic and political exchange maintains a focus
on content over form
23
Hollander 23-25. Sigourney’s ekphrastics are as follows: “Pompey’s Statue , at
whose pedestal Julius Caesar fell, is still preserved in the Palazzo Spadae, in
Rome”(1827),“On a Picture of Penitence”(1834), “The Last Supper. A picture by
Leonardo da Vinci“(1834), “The Schoolmistress. Adapted to a Picture”(1834), The
Consumptive Girl. From a picture”(1834), “Picture of a Sleeping Infant, Watched by a
Dog”(1834), “Lady Jane Grey. On seeing a picture representing her engaged in the study
of Plato”(1837), “Sabbath Evening in the Country. Suggested by a picture”(1837), “Child
Left in a Storm. Adapted to a painting by Sully”(1837), “Statue of the Spinning Girl, at
Chatsworth, the Seat of the Duke of Devonshire”(1841), “The Landing of the Pilgrims. A
picture by G. Flagg“ (1848), “Powers’s Statue of the Greek Slave”(1854), To a
Portrait”(1860).!
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This reliance on image “types” is arguably the most significant marker of
Sigourney’s ekphrasis. It not only locates the poetry within an era when such forms
would be recognizable to a wide range of readers, but connects this seemingly niche
canon to broader sentimental aesthetics. Kerry Larson identifies Sigourney’s poetic mode
precisely through her use of such types: by working from a “stable stock of recurring
images and highly stereotyped scenarios,” she ensures the reader’s emotional and
imaginative participation in the scene of her writing (84). For such “literary
egalitarianism,” as Larson terms it, the burgeoning print sphere would have been an
unmitigated blessing: it offered a seemingly endless supply of easily recognizable scenes
(77). Sigourney’s ekphrasis, then, is not a not a tangential offshoot of a larger canon, but
a possible metonym for it, a means of thinking about the form of spectatorship and
participation that Sigourney demands of her readers.
This participation, despite the apparent informality of Sigourney’s verse and her
own stress on its spontaneity, operates within a consistent set of rules. The dominant trait
of this ekphrasis is a concern with the emotionalized subject of the artwork rather than
the particular characteristics of the object. Shifting metaphors and the frequent failure to
cite a particular artist or title of the “picture” in question complicate readers’ attempts to
envision a concrete image. The very subjects that Sigourney chooses for her ekphrastic
representation highlight emotion over form; without exception, Sigourney’s ekphrastic
images are moments of suspension, moments of stillness between heightened activity or
even violence, moments centered on a mode of sympathetic affect. And the poems,
without exception, encourage readers to enter into this emotional space by echoing
gestures or movements from the images described.
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The forms of address work to heighten this emotive participation, as Sigourney’s
speakers move between direct address, apostrophe, and collective gestures. Sigourney’s
poetry in general often relies on a direct address to readers to bridge the gap between
author and audience, and then a movement to a collective “we” or “us” to bridge to the
gap between individual readers. Her ekphrastic poems also, by definition, rely on
apostrophe, the moment when a poetic speaker turns away from the audience to address
an absent or imaginary figure. (That these poems in general are not illustrated only
heightens the “absence” of the images). Mary Louise Kete has called apostrophe “the
essential rhetorical trope of sentimentalism,” because in gesturing toward absence,
apostrophe creates a link between the actual and the ideal (or as Kete puts it, “temporality
and eternity”) and so offers the possibility within the poem of a “nonviolated
community”(17; 45; 47). Though this construction applies most obviously to elegiac
verse, it has its place in ekphrasis. These poems cannot offer a link between the living
and the dead, but they can draw a line for readers between their actual and ideal selves,
with absent images standing in for models. And in culminating, as these poems often do,
in a collective “we,” they imagine this path as one that individual readers take together.
Sigourney’s “Lady Jane Grey: On Seeing a Picture Representing Her Engaged in
the Study of Plato”(1837) models many of these characteristics. Thrust into power
through a politicized turn of events in 1554, Grey rules as queen for only a matter of days
before being imprisoned and ultimately executed on her usurper’s orders. In Sigourney’s
hands, as in most nineteenth-century accounts, Grey is a Protestant model of studiousness,
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piety, and strength in adversity.24 At the same time, as in all of Sigourney’s ekphrastic
poems, the moral lesson that the writing instills is complicated by its visual impetus. The
poem moves through several scenes in Grey’s life, but its central ekphrastic moment, in
the second and third stanzas, is key to defining both her character and the poem’s ideals
of visual spectatorship:
Hark ! the hunting-bugle sounds,
Thy father's park is gay,
Stately nobles cheer the hounds,
Soft hands the coursers sway,
Haste to the sport, away ! away !
Youth, and mirth, and love are there,
Lingerest thou, fairest of the fair,
In thy lone chamber to explore
Ancient Plato's classic lore ?
Old Roger Ascham's gaze
Is fix'd on thee with fond amaze ;
Doubtless the sage doth marvel deep,
That for philosophy divine
A lady could decline
The pleasure 'mid yon pageant-train to sweep,
The glory o'er some five-barr'd gate to leap,
And in the toil of reading Greek
Which many a student flies,
Find more entrancing rhetoric
Than fashion's page supplies.
The painting here is not named, but depictions of this scene were familiar from histories
of England and books of biographical sketches designed for children’s education. This
source aligns well with Sigourney’s own use of the instructive scene: both the poem and
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24
The perception of Grey as a Protestant martyr and innocent political pawn is
one dependent to some extent on the circulation of apocryphal letters and testimonials
from after Grey’s death into the eighteenth century. Sigourney echoes this perspective in
framing Grey’s reign as engineered primarily by the Duke of Northumberland, her fatherin-law. See John Guy, “The Story of Jane Grey,” Painting History (London: National
Gallery Company, 2010) 9-14.
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a prose biography of Grey’s life were later reprinted in Sigourney’s juvenile readers.25
The appropriateness of the scene as an educative model is immediately apparent: it
centers on the Tudor educator Robert Ascham’s discovery of Grey absorbed in Phaedo
while while the rest of her family is out to hunt. Ascham apparently marveled at Grey’s
reading Plato “with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in
Boccaccio” (qtd. in Guy 9). In Sigourney’s hands, the comparison becomes more relevant
to her own cultural moment: the Grey who can in Plato “find more entrancing rhetoric /
Than fashion’s page supplies” is a figure whose victories speak directly to the would-be
virtuous readers of Sigourney’s audience. Grey’s ability to resist the frivolities of the
fashion magazine, or the allures of the “pageant train” make of her an instructive model,
rather than a historically and experientially distant Protestant martyr.
The focus of this instructive pose is on a visual restraint that Sigourney’s readers
almost inevitably echo. Grey is both a textually-absorbed subject, and an object of
Ascham’s “gaze,” both mesmerized and mesmerizing. She shows control over her own
visual environment in resisting the visual entrancement of fashion plates, even as her own
image is (unconsciously, of course) capable of inspiring a similar entrancement, or “fond
amaze.” The reader’s “gaze” is defined by the same restraint, as she in her own “lone
chamber” takes in Sigourney’s didactic text. The scene of the poem—characterized by
few physical markers, and notable principally for the emotional intensity of Ascham’s
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25
For illustrated accounts of this moment in Grey’s history, see for instance The
Juvenile Plutarch; Containing Accounts of the Lives of Celebrated Children and of the
Infancy of Persons Who Have Been Illustrious for their Virtues or Talents (Boston:
Monroe and Francis, 1827), 35-42. Sigourney reproduced accounts of Jane Grey’s life—
and in particular her encounter with Robert Ascham—in How to Be Happy. Written for
the Children of Some Dear Friends. (Hartford: D.F. Robinson & Co., 1833), 87-88; The
Boy’s Reading-Book: In Prose and Poetry, For Schools (New York: J. Orville Taylor,
1839), 50-51; Letters to Young Ladies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846), 119.
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“fond amaze”—models for this dutiful reader how they themselves should expect to be
seen. The act of visual restraint does not deny the power of the image, but promises
readers that they themselves can become the entrancing images.
The final stanza of the poem culminates in the speaker’s echoing of Grey’s
restrained model of spectatorship. By this point in the poem, the reader has seen Grey
through her imprisonment in the Tower of London and the execution of her husband,
Guildford. This final scene focuses on Grey’s own execution. But Sigourney’s poem not
only does not acknowledge an ekphrastic source for this moment—a significant omission
considering that the most reprinted Jane Grey painting of the 1830s was Paul Delaroche’s
Execution of Jane Grey (1834)—it resists any visual representation of scene at all (Bann
and Whiteley 102-10):
Away! Away! I will not see the deed.
Fresh drops of crimson stain the new-fall’n snow,
The wintry winds wail fitfully and low;-But the meek victim is not there,
Far from this troubled scene,
High o’er the tyrant queen,
She finds that crown which from her brow
No envious hand may tear.
This alternate execution and coronation models the same visual restraint as Grey’s
abstention from the hunt. In both cases, the viewer avoids the violent spectacle of one
scene for the ideality of another, whether the philosophy of Plato or a spiritual coronation.
The emphasis here on emotional transference and ideal, generalized images
correlates closely with the ekphrastic work of Felicia Hemans, a literary predecessor to
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whom Sigourney is often compared.26 Hemans offered a prolific ekphrastic model: as
Frederick Burwick writes, “No poet in the romantic period turned more extensively to
ekphrasis than did Felicia Hemans”(108). In fact, Hemans wrote 38 ekphrastics in the
course of her career, more than the major Romantic poets combined (Scott 36). She, like
Sigourney, did not see many of the original works that “suggested” her own poems, and
her ekphrastic works show “a desire to meet the artwork with an immediate emotional
response, rather than to dwell on its technical or illusionistic qualities” (37). This
characteristic, as well as Hemans’s attraction to more “egalitarian” genres such as
portraits, sketches, and monuments, undoubtedly left its mark on Sigourney’s ekphrastic
writing.27 Sigourney’s point of distinction, and her strongest connection to the emerging
culture of popular prints and engravings, lies in the language of disciplinary intimacy.
Sigourney’s ekphrasis is deeply rooted in the concerns of early nineteenth-century
education. Among these concerns is the educational philosophy— what Richard
Brodhead calls “disciplinary intimacy”— that inspired much of Sigourney’s pedagogical
writing. Influential among many educational thinkers of the 30s and 40s, the theory is
based on the idea that children learn best through love of the instructor, rather than
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26
Sigourney was called the “American Hemans” by contemporaries, a title that
Edgar Allan Poe claimed she had gained “solely by imitation”(Essays and Reviews 875).
Sigourney was aware, but apparently undisturbed by such accusations. In Select Poems
(1841), she wrote the following note to what is today her most well-known poem, “Death
of an Infant”: “This little poem has been inserted by mistake, in one of the American
editions of the late Mrs. Hemans. Though this is accounted by the real author, as an honor,
it is still proper to state, that it was originally composed at Hartford, in the winter of 1824,
and comprised in a volume of poems, published in Boston, by S. G. Goodrich, Esq., in
1827”(30).
27
Scott 36. That Sigourney was aware of Hemans’s ekphrastic work is certain; in
her sketch of the poetess in Examples from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
(1857) she mentions both Hemans’s early visits to art galleries in London and her
ekphrastic volume The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816).!
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through the threat of corporal punishment or rigorous discipline; the teacher is a
personified and sentimentalized authority modeled on, and in many cases enacted by, the
mother. This teacher-parent plays a minimal outward role in regulating the child’s actions,
but becomes “an inwardly regulating moral consciousness”(Brodhead 72). The student
internalizes the sentimentalized figure of authority in much the same way that the ideal
reader of Sigourney’s ekphrastic poems internalizes the central image.
The reflection of educational principles Sigourney’s poems of image
spectatorship is evidence of a profound shift in cultural conceptions of the visual arts.
Sigourney’s ekphrastic writing is indebted to a relatively new model of the visual arts in
the antebellum period, one that saw imagery as having an important place within middleclass education. The conception of the arts and arts education for women in particular
shifted from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, from an elitist
“ornamental” practice that showed leisure time and improved the prospects of good
marriage, to one of “industry” which evidenced desirable qualities such as patience,
devotion, and the development of skill. These qualities, which moved artistic practice
into the moral realm, were highlighted in women’s conduct books and writings on
women’s education throughout the nineteenth century. In such texts, visual art was touted
as “the mightiest means of moral culture,” but most conduct books and drawing manuals
were vague as to how, precisely, this “moral culture” was to be instilled (qtd. in Zlotnick
1). Sigourney’s ekphrastic poems emphasize the process of reading an image over the
final culminating moral, and thus provide a clearer primer on how images are to teach.
By demonstrating a relation to the image that is, much like the mother-child relationship,
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based in empathy, these poems show the extent to which viewing practices were
intertwined with emotional bonds.
At the same time the nature of this emotion—divorced from a specific agent,
produced in order to be reproduced—can also tell us something about the task of
Sigourney’s poetry more generally. Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson argue that one
reason for the continual disappearance and “(re)discovery” of nineteenth-century
American and British Poetesses in the scholarship of the past many years is that the
Poetess is “not the content of her own generic representation: not a speaker, not an ‘I,’
not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self”(523). The
Poetess, working within the conventions of women’s “sentimental” verse, emits emotion
from a speaker who is not herself, but a lyrical type of Woman. My own reading of
Sigourney’s ekphrasis attempts to locate this lyric absence within a mode that centers
prominently on an absent subject. Most of these poems elide the lyric “I” altogether, and
the voice of the Poetess serves only to emulate the gestures of an (unpictured) artwork,
and to present this emulation as a model for further reproduction. Poetry here is not, as
John Stuart Mill famously defines it, “feeling confessing itself to itself”; Sigourney’s
ekphrasis functions as a means of reproducing a generalized emotion through the
particular body of the reader. Insofar as this feeling is “personal,” it is the reader who
provides this particularity. And as all ekphrasis is, in its simplest sense, a copy, an
attempt at artistic emulation, Sigourney’s ekphrasis culminates in a copy of a copy,
refined to a sentimental essence. This mode of image description is the product of artistic
conventions that see production of the copy as an end in itself, a goal not only in poetry,
but in the visual arts and education.
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Disciplinary Intimacy and Sigourney’s Domestic Education
Before moving on to an analysis of Sigourney’s poems in the next section, I will
in this section set up some of the background that informed her ekphrastic choices,
including the principles of her domestic education, and the part that images—increasingly
familiar and familial—played in this moral instruction. Disciplinary intimacy and the
value of emotional bonds in teaching infuse all of Sigourney’s pedagogical writing. The
model of disciplinary intimacy, though it may be applied to formal education, is based on
the domestic bonds that precede such schooling. Witness for instance the quote that from
Sigourney’s Letters to Mothers (1838) that Brodhead uses to explain his understanding of
disciplinary intimacy:
[The mother] should keep her hold on [the child’s] affections, and encourage him
to confide in her, without reserve, his intention and his hopes, his error and his
enjoyments. Thus maintaining her pre-eminence in the sanctuary of his mind, her
image will be as tutelary seraph, not seeming to bear rule, yet spreading
perpetually the wings of purity and peace over its beloved shrine, and keeping
guard for God. (qtd. in Brodhead 20).
Brodhead’s understanding of disciplinary intimacy, based as it is in part on Sigourney’s
writing, is one that sees the maternal model as primary, instrumental to both the model of
domestic and formal education. The mother here reproduces herself as an “image” in the
child’s mind, copying her didactic essence. The idea of the maternal as “tutelary seraph,”
placed in the in the “sanctuary” of her child’s mind—an idea that, as Brodhead
acknowledges, seems perhaps as ominous as the corporal punishment that it aimed to
replace—echoes throughout Sigourney’s discussion of her own childhood and domestic
education. Her reflection on her parents and her early domestic education in her
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autobiography is typical of these sentiments: “Their wishes I never gainsaid; indeed, the
idea of having any will opposed to theirs, or separate from it, never entered my
imagination” (Letters of Life 42).
That the parental bond should be the model for Sigourney’s educational principles
is not surprising, given the home-centeredness of Sigourney’s own schooling and
schooling in general during this period. Sigourney’s own formal education ended at
thirteen; though she attended different schools intermittently after this point, the principle
education of her teenage years was home-based. In her late-life biography she details the
different elements of this education, which included both domestic tasks such as sewing
and cleaning as well as more scholarly work such as Greek translation; she also stresses
her mother’s instrumental role in encouraging her early education. In her writings on
education, she recurrentlly supports this model of schooling, noting for instance in the
chapter “Domestic Education” from Letters to Mothers that “I am not without hope of
persuading mothers, to take charge of the entire education of their children, during the
earlier years of life”(101). Many of her educational primers, like The History of Marcus
Aurelius, Emperor of Rome (1836) were written primarily for use in domestic education.
And while domestic education, by the height of Sigourney’s career in the 1830s and 40s,
was on the way out, replaced by boarding schools and the growing popularity of Horace
Mann’s common school movement, it was not until the turn of the century that
mandatory public education became wholly integrated into American life. (“Common
School Movement”).
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In Sigourney’s home-based model of schooling, the social bonds that are
strengthened through the routines of education are ends in and of themselves. This
emphasis emerges clearly in a passage from The History of Marcus Aurelius:
Do you ever complain, my dear children, that it is hard to remember long lessons?
There are four ways to make this easy. 1st. Read them slowly many times. 2d.
Think of nothing else, while you are reading them. 3d. Close the book and repeat
them to yourself. 4th. Read the more difficult parts again, and see if there is any
thing in this lesson like what you have learned before, and talk about it with your
parents or companions. (83).
The approach to rote learning here both ends and begins in an appeal to emotional bonds.
From the first line addressing the students as “my dear children” to the last counseling
students to “talk about [the lesson] with your parents or companions,” Sigourney in this
model prioritizes social bonds and their routines, what Mary Loeffelholz calls “the
habitus of schooling”(48) over any positive or concrete knowledge. There is no sense in
this four-step system of the broader application that this “memory” serves; memory, like
the social exchanges that in the fourth step reinforce it, is a good in and of itself.28
These social exchanges are part of a larger move toward the abstraction of the
lesson as a means of creating memory. The progression of Sigourney’s steps traces a
movement from knowledge contained in a physical text to knowledge as a part of an
emotional network. The first two steps emphasize repetition and focus respectively, and
are centered on the presence of the printed text in the learning process. The third and
fourth steps, on the other hand, distance learning from the written text or reiterated lesson.
The third step, the place where real memory is enacted (“repeat them to yourself”),
depends entirely on the suppression of the physical text (“close the book”). This
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%,!For Sigourney’s emphasis on “the habitus of schooling” over positive
knowledge in girls’ education, see Loeffelholz 45-64.!
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suppression continues into the fourth step, as readers are told to re-contextualize the text
or lesson to fit it into their own lives, to tie it to “what you have learned before” and to
“talk about it with your parents or companions.” This transformation from lifeless,
reiterated text to living, experienced knowledge is one that depends intimately on the
conception of the lesson as a fixed physical object that is can be abstracted and reconceptualized as a part of each student’s individual experience.
This educational model is crucial to understanding the didactic function of
Sigourney’s ekphrasis. Sigourney’s ekphrastic poems, though they often do culminate in
the transmission of some concrete lesson, emphasize the means of arriving at this
lesson—through a social exchange that owes much to disciplinary intimacy—over the
final moral. If memory, for Sigourney, is exercised through the suppression and the reinterpretation of the physical text, a similar process is at work with regard to the visual
image. Poems centering on a visual image withhold the images that they reference,
metaphorically “closing the book,” and prompting readers to re-create these scenes
intellectually. Many also encourage readers to imagine themselves as entering into these
image-lessons and participating in the scenes that the speaker describes, connecting the
image-settings to their own lives and what they have “learned before.” Like Sigourney
herself, who could not in her youth imagine having a “will opposed” to that of her parents,
the speakers of these poems ask readers to place themselves in the position of the images
that they have imagined, and in the process of this placement to absorb their lessons.
These lessons are at times profoundly ambiguous or apparently contradictory, but the
process of emulating the forms of morality, rather than analyzing its content, is the
ultimate end of these poems. That is because, for Sigourney, form and content are so
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closely allied as to be indistinguishable. As she writes in describing the illustration of her
later volumes, “the fine exterior of a book has the same bearing on its contents that
graceful manners have upon character”: that is, they prove it (Letters of Life 366).
The passage of Marcus Aurelius also hints at Sigourney’s espousal of a model of
education in which the student transforms knowledge into memory by visualization, a
model that is in inherent contradiction to paragonal conceptions of the verbal and the
visual as natural opposites. That we can think of the memory of text and the memory of
image as dependent on the same processes relies on Sigourney’s own sense of the close
relation between text and image. The text for Sigourney was a material form as well as an
immaterial idea; it could exist as a reproduction (“repeat it to yourself”) in the student’s
mind, before circulating more freely in conversation. Other writings show that Sigourney
construes this mental reproduction visually, as in the following account of her own early
education: “Having very early learned to read by myself the forms of words, and their
syllabic construction, dwelt in memory like the minutiae of a picture, so that the usual
amount of study made me fearlessly perfect in the daily orthographical lesson.”29 The
sense here of remembering words not for their meanings, but for their imagistic “forms”
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29
Letters of Life 50. This construction of text as image was not uncommon in
antebellum America; Sigourney was in company with several artists and drawing book
authors, in connecting learning to write with learning to draw. Rembrandt Peale, for
instance makes the connection throughout his book Graphics: A Manual of Drawing and
Writing for the Use of Schools and Families (New York: J.P. Pealee, 1835), which
includes lessons on both penmanship and drawing basic to complex forms. He outlines
the connection in the introduction: “Writing is nothing else than drawing the forms of
letters. Drawing is little more than writing the forms of objects. Every one that can learn
to write is capable of learning to draw; and every one should know how to draw, that can
find advantage in writing. The two may be taught together without increasing the task of
the learner, provided the teacher understands the right method; which is, to habituate the
hand to move in all directions, and the eye to judge whether the movements be
correct”(6).
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goes a long way toward showing why Sigourney’s ekphrasis is in such direct opposition
to the mode of the paragone; its function as a tool for moral education dictates that any
tool that facilitates the goal of becoming “fearlessly perfect” is a valuable one to use,
even if it blurs the cultural distinctions between media.
Rather than setting the verbal and the visual arts in opposition, Sigourney
understands both as solitary untaught activities, not practices to be cultivated in formal
training. Sigourney’s conception of her own writing as both spontaneous and natural is
well-documented. She took a similar attitude toward the visual arts. In Letters of Life she
records having learned the ornamental arts, which included drawing, embroidery and
other “fingerworks,” in school, and later, in her first teaching assignment, being
compelled to teach these “accomplishments” though considering them “too tedious to
mention”(190) When she later opening her own school with the support of Daniel
Wadsworth, she expresses only “delight” at having the freedom to avoid these
“ornamental branches”(203). But she writes of drawing and painting at home as one of
her primary activities in her earliest years, and the independence of these artistic attempts
is the source for a large part of their appeal. As she paints pictures with a brush made out
of her own hair and pigments pressed from berries, “the rapture enjoyed in my solitary
chamber, as these untaught efforts accumulated, was indescribable”(55). The rules of
color that she would learn after entering school “seemed rather an incumbrance,” and she
soon abandoned painting, at the precocious age of eight, for a “boldness of literary
enterprise”(57).
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This emphasis on informal arts education is, as Mary Loeffelholz writes, more “romantic”
than earlier forms, but it is also more democratic.30 It assumes, like Sigourney’s ekphrasis,
an access to visual models and illustrations within the home. In her early accounts of
drawing, the pictures that Sigourney records undertaking are landscapes, history scenes,
and book illustrations, modeled on engravings or prints. She writes of “copy[ing] large
and complicated patterns” from “the illustrations of my Hieroglyphic Bible” and
Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) (Letters of
Life 56; 54). Like the many art manuals from this period that did not distinguish between
drawing from nature and drawing from other images, Sigourney’s own examples show
the extent to which the movement of arts education from the elite spheres to the middleclass home is one that depended on the greater availability of imagery.
The Familiar and Familial Image
The first, and by far the largest group of Sigourney’s ekphrastic poems do not
clearly identify their visual objects by title or artist. These objects are nonetheless both
familiar and familial, works of the kind which would form a part of the family sphere,
and at the same time which in some way document this family sphere. In this ekphrasis
we can see many of the tropes of Sigourney’s ekphrasis as a whole: its de-emphasis of
physical description in favor of the fuller experiential relation to an image, the ease with
which the poem’s speaker approaches the artwork, and the deferral of any real analysis of
the poem’s final moral lesson.
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30
See Larson 75-96 for a discussion of Sigourney’s literary egalitarianism
(especially in the context of her elegiac verse), and Loeffelholz 38-39 for a discussion of
Sigourney’s later-life romantic self-fashioning.
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The first two of these works focus on the original painted portraits that in the later
eighteenth and early nineteenth century middle-class families procured from itinerant
artists, artisans or limners.31 The short story “Family Portraits” (1834) provides an
introduction to the evasive nature of the material object in Sigourney’s ekphrastic work,
and the effect that an image, even in its absence, has on an audience. The story follows
the outlines of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth seduction genre: the cast of characters,
which includes a French maid, a dashing officer, and an innocent schoolgirl could be
lifted almost in its entirety from Charlotte Temple (1791). The narrative arc is similarly
familiar, centering on a disastrous elopement, albeit with a Sigournean redemptive turn at
the end (the protagonist is spared both pregnancy and death). But beneath the narrative of
secrecy and youthful failures of judgment runs an argument about portraiture, and more
generally, the hierarchy of artistic media. The argument that emerges in the course of the
story understands the verbal and the visual as imperfect complements, aspects of a whole
that come together to produce a fuller truth. Images in this story are not high-cultural
objects for the poet to vie with, but familiar objects which the narrator feels comfortable
both mocking and heeding. The means by which we as readers can also learn from these
verbally-translated images is instrumental to the story’s function as a primer for ekphrasis.
The story begins with an epigram in the style of Sigourney’s own elegiac verse:
“Blest be that art, which keeps the absent near,--/…/ And when Love yields its idol to the
tomb, / Doth snatch a copy.—”32 This reverential introduction is soon countered by the
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31
See Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 6-8, 6971; or Barbara Groseclose, Nineteenth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2527.
32
See for instance the last lines of the first stanza of “Artist Sketching the Dead”:
“Blessed gift is thine/ Oh Artist! thus to foil the grave , and keep / A copy of our jewels,
when it steals / And locks them from us.”!
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narrative’s actual portraiture. By the second paragraph, the sharp shift in tone toward this
“art” sets off the epigram’s irony; just as this introductory poem is only an imperfect
copy of Sigourney’s own elegy, so portraiture, we learn, is a very imprecise medium for
self-preservation. The narrator discusses portraiture as one “modification” of the “Love
of Fame” which aims to bequeath “our bodily form to posterity, in a style calculated to
disgust, or alarm them”(85). She continues: “When I have gazed at Family Portraits,
whose ugliness and quaintness of costume, scarcely the deepest reverence for their
antiquity could tolerate, I have wondered at the ambition to be exhibited to one's unborn
relatives, in a deformity which nature never gave”(85-6).
This rant is followed abruptly by a shift to the setting of the story, with only the
brief reassurance that, “Why I have been led to this train of moralizing, the sequel of my
sketch will unfold.” The tale goes on to follow Mary, a beautiful fourteen-year old
descendent of French Huguenot parents living in Boston in 1722, and her concealed
loved affair with a dashing older man who we know only as Captain Patten. Mary, whose
mother Louise died shortly after her own birth, is raised by her absent-minded father,
Doctor Ranchon, and her intrigue-starved French “waiting-maid,” Madelaine. It is in a
conversation with Madelaine that the subject of portraits next comes up, as we learn that
Mary’s mother, who according to the maid, was “like Venus, in that picture in your
uncle’s chamber, where Paris…is choosing between three goddesses,” never sat for a
satisfactory portrait. She had her portrait taken, not by one of the “court painters from
France,” as Madelaine would have had it, but rather by one of the “jackasses of this
country”(97). The results were predictably bad; the posture and expression were out-of
character, the figure “stiff…and with such an abominably silly expression,” and the
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colors harsh. Madelaine, according to her own account, later found Doctor Ranchon
burning the picture (98).
But this picture is not the only one to which the story owes its name. After the
chronicling of Mary’s attempted elopement, and the revelation of Captain Patten as a
fraud and coward, we learn that Mary eventually settles down with another Huguenot
“worthy of her affections”(127). This pair, the narrator continues, “have for several years
been looking down upon me from their ample frames, whenever I pass a particular part of
the mansion.” The reference to antiquated portraits on the walls of mansions recalls the
diatribe on the first page of the story, but the narrator continues by saying that “Both
portraits are in far better taste than is usual for those that bear the date of more than a
century: the hands in particular, which are allowed to be some criterion of an artist’s style,
are elegantly finished.” She then concludes that frequent inquiries from visitors on the
origin of the portraits led her to “search our family records, and you have seen the result,
in the foregoing sheets”(128). These records show a surprising history for the “grave lady”
of the portrait, but the portraits themselves are evidence for the narrator’s truthfulness; as
she writes in the last line: “Should any person continue sceptical as to the truth of the
facts herein related, he may see, should he travel in the land of steady habits, those same
family portraits, and be told the name of the husband of Mary Ranchon”(129).
The role of portraiture in this story is as difficult to pin down as the precise
referent for the title’s “Family Portraits.” On the one hand, a gibe at Colonial American
portraiture seems evident both in the references to awkward poses and detailing
characteristic of this era, and in the story’s time frame. On the other hand, the more
sophisticated “court painters of France,” and by extension, the Old World, fare little
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better, promoted as they are by the coquettishly immoral force of the maidservant, who in
this tale represents Mary’s near-downfall (97). Mary’s mother may look like Venus in the
classic painterly scene of Paris’s judgment, but Venus is also the ensign that appears in
the wax stamp of the letter from Mary’s fraudulent lover. This progression pegs
portraiture either as awkward misrepresentation or seductive vanity. The story’s
conclusion then complicates this damnation, as Mary’s portrait becomes both the spur to
the narrator’s research, and the evidence for her truthfulness. Furthermore, though as
“grave” as other colonial portraits, the narrator’s appreciation of the skill represented in
often-fumbled details such as the hands offers some optimism for the medium. Indeed, it
seems that Mary’s mother has more in common with the ancestors in the narrator’s
prelude who “may esteem themselves happy, should their effigies escape utter
annihilation” than Mary herself, whose portrait hangs prominently displayed in this same
narrator’s home (86).
Mary’s portrait, then, serves to represent both the greater hope for what American
portraiture may become, and the function of the visual as a category. The family portrait
in question is a middle ground between the primitive painting of America’s colonial past
that the narrator criticizes in the story’s introduction and the overwrought artistry of
Europe’s monarchical past. As such it represents a hopeful future for the
professionalization of American portraiture, a future that, by the time of Sigourney’s
writing, had arguably already come to pass.33 At the same time, the powers of images in
the tale are strictly delineated from those of verbal expression. The portrait in this story
serves as a spur to action for the narrator, prompting her to look into her family’s written
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33
See for instance Groseclose 35-59.
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records for a history of its subject, but these written records, rather than the portrait itself,
provide the substantive foundation for the tale. The portrait, in fact, with its prim attire
and posture, actively contradicts the truth of the narrative; while a verbal account
provides a full narrative context, the visual image at best provides inspiration and
fragmentary truth.
This delineation of the powers of the verbal and the visual—a delineation that
seems to favor the verbal as a mode of expression—is in turn complicated both by
evidence in the two central documents of the narrative that the verbal can serve both to
conceal and to reveal truth. The first document is a letter from Captain Patten to Mary,
sealed with a “head of Venus,” and containing a “studied” expression of love and appeal
for elopement—an appeal that is later found to be based on the ulterior motives of
inheritance (105-6). This letter, intended to deceive, inspires a course of action that is
fully undone only when another letter is uncovered. The second document is a letter from
Patten’s wife found in his wallet as he fled the scene, and reveals not only that he is
married and has children in Ireland, but that he is living in America under an assumed
name and profession. Only in putting the two epistles together is a fully satisfactory
portrait of Patten is formed; as with visual images, written records are often only
accounts of a partial truth.
Furthermore, the combination of the portrait of Mary Ranchon and her written
records, rather than one or the other, serve as evidence for the truthfulness of the
narrative as a whole. When the narrator concludes that any person who is “sceptical as to
the truth of the facts herein related” can see both “those same family portraits” and “be
told the name of the husband of Mary Ranchon” she harnesses both verbal and visual
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representation to her defense (129). Just as it often takes more than a single verbal or
visual record to tell a rounded truth, the narrator here relies on the visual image and its
narrative “label” to create a whole that can, or should, serve as convincing evidence to
readers. If a comparison between the media is at work, it is a comparison that ultimately
comes to understand the verbal and the visual as complementary aspects of a whole,
rather than competing forces.
The story, then, clearly does not follow the conventional competitive model of the
paragone but functions as a primer for reading the absent visual images of a different
kind of verbal ekphrasis. At the center of the story is Mary’s mother Louise, the
narrative’s would-be didactic figure. Conversations between the waiting-maid and Mary
often revolve largely around this absent figure and the destruction of her sole visual
record, “that vile picture”(98). Given the absence of this image, and the absentmindedness of her father, Mary is entirely reliant on Madelaine to reconstruct a verbal
depiction of her mother. Just as Captain Patten’s epistles offer two different textual
versions of his life, so Madelaine proffers two verbal accounts of Louise. Both have an
influence on Mary and eventually guide her actions, and both function as guides to the
goals and dangers of ekphrastic viewership.
The description that first has an effect on Mary’s actions is one of a beautiful girl
who, “just your own age” of sixteen, escapes from a convent and elopes with the lover
who will become Mary’s father (98). As Madelaine recounts, Louise escapes with the
help of her brother and Madelaine, and shortly thereafter the group follows Doctor
Ranchon to America. This account of Mary’s mother is not directly based on an image,
but Madelaine’s persistent emphasis on Louise’s beauty recalls the parallel she makes
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early in the story to “that picture [of Venus] in your uncle’s chamber”(97). In any case,
this model is one that “touched a chord”(99) for Mary, as the waiting-maid clearly
intended. As she chides, “If [your mother] had not shown her Beauchamp blood, and ran
away at just that time, she would have been moped to death in a convent, just as you are
likely to be in your own father’s house”(99). Mary briefly echoes Madelaine’s version of
her mother in her own attempted elopement, also by carriage, and with the help of this
same waiting-maid. Just as her mother’s elopement brought eventual death in the “dull,
heavy air of Boston,”(97)—and the Judgment of Paris in her uncle’s picture brings about
the Trojan War—one can surmise that Mary’s marriage to the treacherous Patten might
have had a disastrous outcome had it succeeded.
In the end, the verbal model that has a much more profound effect on Mary’s life
is that of the portrait that her father burned. This grave portrait, again mediated through
Madelaine, figures Mary’s mother with “such an abominably silly expression, so entirely
out of character” and holding a book, “looking vastly like a bible”(98). Mary’s own
portrait, as described by the narrator, has some clear resonances; in the painting, Mary
appears as “a lady dressed in a brown silk, with raven hair parted plainly upon her
forehead, and holding in her hand a snuff-box, with an aspect rather grave than beautiful.”
She also, we are told, “looks as if she might have read daily lectures against coquetry and
elopement to her children”(128-9). The knowing tone that both Madelaine and the
narrator take toward the propriety of these images both reveals their familiarity with this
mode of portraiture and complicates the seemingly straightforward moral outcome of the
tale. That the apparently “good” moral outcome of this final portrait—Mary’s husband
“greatly enhanced her happiness by his love, and her respectability by his
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wisdom”(129)—is one that can be lightly mocked obfuscates any clear-cut moral. This is
not, in other words, a straightforwardly didactic narrative on the dangers of elopement.
Rather, “Family Portraits” is a story that provides a model for the emulative function of
ekphrasis. The similarity between the elopement and matron portraits, and Mary’s own
choices is suggestive of the influence of the verbally-mediated ekphrastic image. Mary is
in this story a model of the antebellum ekphrastic reader, a viewer whose visual
experience of the art object is withheld. The visually absent images hold the power to
become a models for emulation, self-perpetuating images that Mary reads by imitating.
Her eventual mimicking of the “good” moral model is less the focus in this tale than the
process of visual emulation itself. In the ekphrastic poems that follow, this model of
image-reproduction echoes through the reader’s relation to Sigourney’s absent but
influential images.
An early ekphrastic poem, “The Schoolmistress,” published for the first time
along with four other ekphrastic poems in the 1834 edition of Poems, demonstrates this
model of emulative ekphrasis in action. The ostensible focus of the poem is a portrait of a
schoolteacher, but the writing produces few clear images; those it does produce are
deferred under a network of metaphor. The image at the center of the poem is a generic
one, and serves primarily to prompt the emotion—nostalgia— that is the poem’s real
subject. The image in this model of ekphrasis is barely an image at all, but allows readers
to see in the stock portrait of the schoolteacher a portrait from their own pasts, and to see
in the memories of schooling memories of their own early educations.
The first lines provide a sense of this elusiveness:
How doth this picture's art relume
Of childhood's scenes the buried bloom!
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How from oblivion's sweeping stream
Each floating flower and leaf redeem !
The picture here promises to unearth the “buried bloom” of faded memories, bringing
distinctness (“Each floating flower and leaf”) where formally was only the “sweeping
stream” of more generalized reminiscence. But even at this early point in the poem, the
natural imagery in these first lines is ambiguous, lying somewhere between metaphor
(memory as nature) and concrete imagery (memories of nature). The focus is not on the
objects themselves, which are abstracted by metaphor, but on the verbs that promise to
bring them to clarity.
Even as flowers and leaves float between metaphor and imagery, the scenes of
childhood that the poem recovers are similarly indistinct, floating between stock imagery
and the particular, individualized memory:
From neighbouring spire, the iron chime
That told the school's allotted time,
The lowly porch where woodbine crept,
The floor with careful neatness swept,
The hour-glass in its guarded nook,
Which oft our busy fingers shook
By stealth, if flowed too slow away
The sands that held us from our play;
The murmured task, the frequent tear,
The timid laugh, prolonged and dear,
These all on heart, and ear, and eye,
Come thronging back, from years gone by.
The picture that this stanza paints is both relatively detailed, and largely generic: a oneroom country schoolhouse with a church nearby, an emblem of antebellum schooling that
populates many of Sigourney’s most famous works.34 The memory is communal rather
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34
See for instance Loeffelholz on “Connecticut River”(1828) 49-62.
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than individual; “our busy fingers” shake the hourglass, and regimented time keeps “us
from our play.” Other actions—“The murmured task, the frequent tear, / The timid laugh,
prolonged and dear”—are separated from their actors so that they belong to the
schoolhouse as a collective rather than a single pupil or teacher. This sense of the
collective confirms Loeffelholz’s idea that in Sigourney’s writing “the social relations of
schooling have a life of their own, partly autonomous of any particular scholarly
matter”(48). Or we could even say, in the context of this poem, autonomous of any
particular students. The standardization of the schoolhouse’s “social relations” invites
Sigourney’s readers to imagine themselves as actors, to engage their own hearts, and ears
and eyes, rather than relying on those of the speaker.
This sense of shared emotion becomes important to the poem’s primary
ekphrastic moment, which centers on a portrait that is more general type than
particularized individual. If the progression of the poem so far—from natural metaphor to
generalized memory, to actual image—would seem to imply that this stanza’s image
should gain specificity, this is a promise that the poem ultimately does not deliver:
And there thou art! in peaceful age
With brow as thoughtful, mild and sage,
As when upon thy pupil's heart
Thy lessons breathed—yes there thou art!
And in thy hand that sacred book
Whereon it was our pride to look,
Whose truths around thy hoary head,
A never-fading halo shed,
Whose glorious hopes in holy trust
Still blossom o'er thy mouldering dust.
The focus on the schoolmistress’s expression, her “brow as thoughtful, mild and sage,”
recalls a similar attention to Mary’s mother’s “abominably silly expression” in “Family
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Portraits.” The aim in both cases is to forefront not distinguishing characteristics, but an
emotional attitude. The expansive power of this emotion is such in the case of “The
Schoolmistress” that it stretches seamlessly from her youth as a schoolteacher, to her old
age at the time of the portrait, and even into death, the “glorious hopes” that “blossom
o’er thy mouldering dust.” That emotion, in this case a pious sagacity, can exist
unchanged through time, and even without the confines of a mortal container, is another
permutation of the “timid laugh” without agent in the last stanza. That this stanza is
ostensibly of a particular portrait does nothing to change the emphasis on free-floating
emotion over actor or form. In fact, this stanza shows a further transfer of emotion; the
teacher enacts a literal inspiration as she “upon thy pupil’s heart / Thy lessons breathed.”
Just as the schoolroom is any antebellum reader’s schoolroom, so too is this
schoolmistress a standard Sigournean instructor.
By the end of the poem, the collective memory that this passage creates further
broadens. While in the previous stanzas “we” and “our” refer either to the particular
schoolchildren who share the speaker’s experience, or to readers who share a similar type
of experience, in the final stanzas of the poem, the pronouns open up more generally to
all readers, as the imagery shifts to the trope of time’s passing. This passing is
represented by natural imagery, imagery that has in turn shifted in significance from the
first stanza. Where at the beginning of the poem, “flower and leaf” stood in for the
individual memory rescued from the “sweeping stream” of oblivion, in these final stanzas,
the stream represents the forward movement of individual people through time. These
last stanzas, in destabilizing even this familiar term, effectively unsettle the poem as a
whole:
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Even thus it is, where'er we range,
Throughout this world of care and change,
Though Fancy every prospect gild,
Or Fortune write each wish fulfill’d,
Still, pausing 'mid our varied track,
To childhood's realm we turn us back,
And wider as the hand of time
Removes us from that sunny clime,
And nearer as our footsteps urge
To weary life's extremest verge,
With fonder smile, with brighter beam,
Its far-receding landscapes gleam,
And closer to the withered breast,
Its renovated charms are prest.
And thus the stream, as on it flows,
'Neath summer-suns, or wintry snows,
Through vale, or maze, or desert led,
Untiring tells its pebbly bed,
How passing sweet the buds that first
Upon its infant marge were nurst,
How rich the violet's breath perfumed,
That near its cradle-fountain bloomed,
And deems no skies were e'er so fair
As kindled o'er its birth-place there.
In the first stanza, the speaker imagines the movement through time as that through a
landscape, a trite metaphor that becomes complex—or unclear—on closer examination.
“We” here are the travelers that move through the landscape that is “this world,” pushed
forward by the forward movement of time. But Sigourney frustrates any attempt to
physically image this scene as she further construes time as “the hand of time,” a
metaphor that fits in only awkwardly in the landscape. Another association is also at
work in the first line, as the phrase “Even thus it is” gestures back to the emotional
expansiveness of the schoolmistress in the previous lines. Through all of these
comparisons, emotion permeates the landscape without any connection to a single agent:
“Fancy” gilds “every prospect” and “landscapes” glow “with fonder smile, with brighter
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beam,” though in both cases it is unclear whether the feeling belongs to the traveler or the
scene itself. The metaphor of life as a movement through a landscape is awkwardly
mixed, is itself a metaphor for the schoolmistress’s emotional permeability, and consists
of emotions whose containers are undefined. The effect of these ambiguities is an
apparently imagistic stanza whose images are only defined by the sentiments that suffuse
them.
In the final stanza, the already cobbled image of life’s progression as that of a
traveler through a landscape shifts again slightly. Here, the image of the poem’s first
line—“oblivion’s sweeping stream”—reappears, this time figured differently, as the
“untiring” forward-progress of individuals through time. This shift both of meaning and
of image is disorienting, as is the shift from referring to the travelers in the previous
stanza (“we”) to the stream (“it”). Thus even the simplest, and most central of
metaphors—the stream—loses its grounding by the end of the poem. Metaphor in this
poem evades tying itself to precise meaning, just as images avoid the specificity that
would make of them concrete and individualized scenes. This imprecision is a failing that
Sigourney’s critics have traditionally bemoaned, but it serves the aim, where ekphrasis is
concerned, of enacting the type of modeling that Mary demonstrates in “Family Portraits.”
Just as Mary is able to see herself in the unfocused images of her mother that Madelaine
provides, so too are “we”—by the end of the poem, a “we” that encapsulates any
reader— able to find our own memories in the nostalgia-infused image of the
schoolmistress.
“Picture of a Sleeping Infant Watched by a Dog” (1834), published in the same
volume as “The Schoolmistress,” similarly frames many of the issues that are central to
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Sigourney’s ekphrastic canon. The scene is based on a sentimentalized genre painting of
the kind printed en masse in popular periodicals such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and gift
books, and increasingly commercialized by American genre painters such as Lilly Martin
Spencer. Sigourney’s ekphrastic presentation of the image assumes familiarity with such
images, calling into question the divisions of the paragone as it plays with the boundaries
between nature and culture, seeing object and passive subject, reader and image. In this
poem as in the last, the generality of Sigourney’s descriptive markers, and the deferral of
any precise imagery beneath a network of figurative language, facilitates the audience’s
entrance into the space of the image. The poem’s central accomplishment is not the slight
moral that it propagates, but the individualized reproduction of its own image in the
minds of readers.
The poem begins by painting a picture of an anonymous genre scene, an idyllic
natural setting structured around a sleeping infant:
Sweet are thy slumbers, baby. Gentle gales
Do lift the curtaining foliage o’er thy head,
And nested birds sing lullaby ; and flowers
That form the living broidery of thy couch
Shed fresh perfume.
The scene is both anonymous and entirely generic; its central markers—wind, leaves,
birds, baby, flowers—do little to distinguish it from countless other genre scenes of this
period. The picture, then, is notable not for any particularized visual feature, but for the
metaphor of the natural as domestic that underlies it and that echoes through Sigourney’s
writing on parenting. No curtains here protect the infant, but “curtaining foliage”; the
infant does not sleep in a crib, but a flowerbed, decorated with “living broidery.” The
living environment takes on domestic responsibilities, the wind airing out the curtain
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above the sleeping baby, the birds lulling it to sleep. This idea of the parental role
extending into the natural environment likewise recurs in Sigourney’s writing on
childhood and mothering; in Letters to Mothers, for instance, Sigourney reverses the
metaphor of nature as mother, counseling new mothers to “guard your own health, and
serenity of spirit, for the child is still a part of yourself, as the blossom of the plant, from
whose root it gains sustenance”(31). Figuring nature as mother, and mother as nature,
Sigourney reveals an understanding of the larger world that is shaped by the principles of
domestic care. The painted scene is immediately “familiar,” a common type that
illustrates both family in the larger world and the larger world as family.
The underlying metaphor of domestic space also functions to distance the physical image:
the image is not of particularized leaves and flowers, but of leaves that seem like curtains,
flowers that seem like a crib. This deferral of the concrete continues into the next stanza,
as another natural proxy for domesticity emerges:
He, too, whose guardian eye
Pondereth thy features with such true delight,
And faithful semblance of parental care,
Counting his master’s darling as his own,
Should aught upon thy helpless rest intrude,
Would show a lion’s wrath.
Just as the natural scene in the first stanza is a stand-in for a domestic scene, so here the
dog of the poem’s title is figured only as a “semblance of parental care.” The last line
adds another layer of metaphor in the “lion’s wrath” that the dog “would show.” The dog,
never named as such, is instead both mother and lion; by again choosing metaphor over
concrete description, Sigourney continues to favor feeling—and its replication—over
form.
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Furthermore, in moving the description of the image into hypothetical territory—
the “wrath” the dog “would show”—the speaker deemphasizes the “picture” as a fixed
visual space, and instead stresses its imaginative possibilities. This emphasis continues
into the next stanza, when the speaker projects the image further into a future space:
And when she comes,
Thy peasant-mother, from her weary toil,
Thy shout will cheer her, and thy little arms
Entwine her sunburnt neck, with joy as full
As infancy can feel.
In this temporal extension of the sphere of the image, the heightened feeling of the two
previous stanzas culminates in an emotional exchange of the kind that Sigourney’s
writing on parenting idealizes. The infant comforts the mother, rather than the other way
around; his “shout will cheer her,” and he, not she, dissipates the threatening weight of
the larger world. This reciprocal relationship between the mother and the child
corresponds to Sigourney’s understanding of the education of children as a constant
exchange of discipline and affection. In Letters to Mothers, an early letter devoted to
“Influence of Children Upon their Parents” begins, “We speak of educating our children.
Do we know that our children also educate us?”(19). Children are capable of teaching
their parents responsibility, unselfishness, and piety; parents are rewarded for their labors
with the children that they deserve. As Sigourney warns, “While the minds of children
are in their most waxen state, let parents then be most assiduous to impress on them such
a likeness, as they should be willing themselves to bear”(21).35
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Brodhead also notes that disciplinary intimacy more generally is based on the
idea of a return: “As it enfolds the child in its love, this mode of authority knowingly
aims to awaken a reciprocal strength of love, and to fix that love back on itself” (20).
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This reciprocity is, we see in the two final stanzas, a model for the reader’s
relation to an ekphrastic image:
They who recline
In luxury’s proud cradle, lulled with strains
Of warbling lute, and watched by hireling eyes,
And wrapped in golden tissue, share, perchance,
No sleep so sweet as thine.
Is it not thus
With us, the larger children? Gorgeous robes,
And all the proud appliances of wealth,
Touch not the heart’s content; but he is blest,
Though clad in humble garb, who peaceful greets
The smile of nature, with a soul of love.
This last stanza gestures out to the collective audience; we “larger children” find
ourselves implicated in this comparison between the “proud appliances of wealth” and
the “smile of nature.” Previously only passive spectators as the infant was a passive
object, in this stanza readers play an active part in the image, giving back to a more
particularized sense of what the scene entails. Both of these shifts transgress the divisions
of the paragone, the conception of the viewer as strictly “an active, speaking, seeing
subject” and the visual as strictly a “passive, seen, and (usually) silent object”(Mitchell
15). In Sigourney’s poem, viewer and object alternately fulfill both roles, working
together in a reciprocal relation that instead owes much of its sense to contemporary
conceptions of parenting.36
This stanza also enforces nature as a privileged point of access to the networks of
emotion that the poem documents. As this last phrase of the poem—“The smile of nature,
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36
This conception of the cyclical nature of nurturing children extended well
beyond Sigourney’s canon, taking a central place in the argument for increased women’s
education, and appearing in many sentimental tales of prodigal sons and daughters. See
for instance Glenda Riley 458-459.
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with a soul of love”— implies, the comparison at work is not just that of wealth and
simplicity, but that of nature and culture. The “warbling lute,” and the “golden tissue”
emphasize the inorganic; the “hireling eyes” have a similar effect, as the artificial bonds
of income are their main descriptor rather than the natural bonds of love or choice.37
Readers are asked to imagine themselves in the infant’s natural setting, a setting that has
the ability to “touch the heart’s content” and to grant access to the poem’s network of
feeling. The “appliances of wealth,” on the other hand, are detached from this network,
and from the aim—to have “a soul of love”—that the poem would instill.
The presentation of the poem’s central painting against these “appliances of wealth” is
striking considering that even widely distributed prints were often marketed as luxury
objects, their expense loudly proclaimed by publishers. The absorption of the “picture”
of the title into the natural setting that it depicts is facilitated by Sigourney’s own selfpresentation. The preface to the 1834 edition of Poems, in which “Picture of a Sleeping
Infant” was first printed, extends this sense of natural expression to Sigourney’s own
verse:
Some of the poems contained in the present collection were written at an early age.
Others interspersed themselves, at later periods, amid domestic occupations, or
maternal cares. The greater part were suggested by passing occasions, and partake
of the nature of extemporaneous productions. All reveal, by their brevity, the
narrow intervals of time which were devoted to their composition.
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37
Here again Sigourney’s ideals of domestic education surface. Letters to
Mothers, which devotes much of its attention to convincing mothers to take a direct role
in their children’s upbringing, warns mothers of infants: “trust not your treasure too much
to the charge of hirelings…When necessarily engaged in other employments, let it hear
your cheering, protecting, tone. Keep it ever within the sensible atmosphere of maternal
tenderness”(32). Other warnings follow about the pernicious influence of “the
conversation of domestics, or other uneducated persons” on children (44).
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They have sprung up like wild flowers in the dells, or among the clefts of the
rock; wherever the path of life has chanced to lead. The hand that gathered and
now presents them, borrows for their motto the sweetly eloquent words of
Coleridge: "I expect from them neither profit nor general fame; and I consider
myself amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding
great reward. It possesses power to soothe affliction,—to multiply and refine
enjoyment,—to endear solitude, and to give the habit of discovering the good and
the beautiful in all that meets or surrounds us." (v-vi).
Sigourney made appeals to the spontaneous and anti-commercial nature of her poetry
throughout her career, but in presenting her own writing as natural, domestic and entirely
divorced from “profit” in the preface to this volume, which included “Picture of an Infant”
and four other ekphrastic poems, Sigourney frames her poetic translation of “pictures” in
these same terms. That the poem’s lesson—that natural domestic love is preferable to
cultured wealth—could conflict with the ekphrastic medium of the work is an issue that
Sigourney facilely brushes past in defining the medium as natural, and in opening this
natural space to readers. A similar deferral is at work in the next poems, where
ekphrastic emulation overrides possible moral difficulties.
The Reproduced Image
A small sub-category of Sigourney’s ekphrastic poems are based not on
anonymous “pictures,” but on images specifically named by title and artist. These poems
generally focus on works that were widely reproduced and would have been accessible to
audiences through relatively inexpensive engravings. Like the poems based on
generalized descriptions of common types of works, these poems work from a broad
conception of what a piece looks like, and prioritize the act of viewing over both the
specific image and the moral issues this image elicits. The titles and artists that feature
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prominently in these poems work not to bring to mind distinct physical characteristics,
but to highlight emotional associations. In effect, the apparently more particularized
poems of Sigourney’s canon are no more concrete than her ekphrastic types, though they
at times draw from a richer web of cultural associations.
“The Last Supper: A Picture by Leonardo Da Vinci”(1834), Sigourney’s most
anthologized ekphrastic poem, was first published in the same edition of Poems as “The
Schoolmistress” and “Picture of an Infant.” The picture that the poem refers to, da
Vinci’s 1498 oil painting, was one of the most famous Italian Renaissance works of the
antebellum period, associated with the growing opportunities for travel among the
American middle class. However, most of Sigourney’s readers, and indeed Sigourney
herself, had never seen da Vinci’s painting in person, and were only familiar with the
work through its engraved reproductions, many of which were only loosely based on the
original.38 Furthermore, those readers who had seen the original painting in the Convent
of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, had seen a mural that after centuries of neglect,
decay, outright destruction, and perhaps most devastatingly, heavy-handed conservation,
could barely be called a painting. Not only was da Vinci’s work nearly indistinguishable
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In fact, Sigourney never saw the painting. On her later 1840-41 trip to Europe,
she spent time in England and France, but skipped Italy. Nonetheless, she had almost
certainly come across engravings of the work. The popularity of Last Supper prints was
such that Goethe, in his 1819 treatise on the painting, offhandedly asks readers to “take
before him [Raffaelle] Morghen's print, it will enable him to understand our remarks,
both in the whole, and in detail” See Observations on Leonardo da Vinci’s Famous
Picture of the Last Supper, Trans. G.H. Noehden (London: Bulmer and Nicol, 1821), 6-7.
Morghen’s engraving, first printed in 1800, was the most respected copies of the early
nineteenth century, and formed the basis for many subsequent engravings. It was often
seen as authoritative because based on a study of the original, but later restoration of
daVinci’s work showed it to be a poor copy of the original.
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underneath the layers of later re-painting, but the outlines of the work as a whole, even
after the later conservation work, were faded, cracking, and in parts, entirely missing. To
title a poem after da Vinci’s painting at this point, then, was to refer to cultural and
emotional associations more than to a particular art-object or composition. (Manthorne
59-60).
The contexts of the poem’s publication and re-publication confirm the difficulty
of locating an imagistic “original.” When “The Last Supper” was first published, it was
printed, like the rest of Sigourney’s ekphrastic poems, without an imagistic referent. The
precise source for Sigourney’s poem is unclear, though both Currier & Ives of New York
and the Kellogg firm of Sigourney’s own Hartford produced several lithographs of The
Last Supper (Finlay 2). In addition, around the time of Sigourney’s first printing of the
poem, life-sized reenactments of the painting were exhibited in Boston and verbal
“Discourses” by several different authors describing were in circulation. In fact,
Sigourney’s own poem was reprinted in 1844 in a pamphlet accompanying one such
discourse, a description of the painting by Gio Gherardo de Rossi translated from Italian.
Two years later, in 1846, the poem was again reprinted in Rufus Griswold’s collection,
Scenes in the Life of the Savior: By the Poets and Painters. This book collects work by
writers including Felicia Hemans, Henry Longfellow and Frances Osgood alongside of
eight engravings. Sigourney’s own poem is accompanied by a print of the Benjamin West
painting of the scene, which presents a much less linear grouping than the Da Vinci
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fresco. The subtitle to Sigourney’s poem acknowledging the da Vinci picture as its source,
is, for good reason, removed in this printing. 39
But even if we take the original da Vinci’s painting— or something close to it—
as Sigourney’s source, this is a work whose primary content is not action but emotion, a
work that highlights the moment Christ tells his disciples of their future betrayal. Early
nineteenth-century viewers valued da Vinci’s painting for its dramatic emotional
portrayal of the familiar scene, and its ability to transparently demonstrate the character
of each of the disciples through his immediate reaction; as one observer claimed, the
painting “requires nothing but a human sympathy for its appreciation”(qtd. in Manthorne
61). That the painting, then, as physical object, had all but disintegrated by the early
nineteenth century is entirely in line with the role that it played in both contemporary
attitudes and in Sigourney’s poem. The focus in this writing is neither on the moral lesson
that it propounds or the image that it describes, but on the speaker’s access to the work’s
emotive shifts, and her step-by-step guidance of readers through a reading of the image. I
reprint the poem in full:
Behold that countenance, where grief and love
Blend with ineffable benignity,
And deep, unuttered majesty divine.
Whose is that eye which seems to read the heart,
And yet to have shed the tear of mortal woe?—
Redeemer! is it thine.—And is this feast,
Thy last on earth?—Why do the chosen few,
Admitted to thy parting banquet, stand
As men transfixed with horror?—
Ah! I hear
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39
See Christ’s Last Supper and Lydia Sigourney, “The Last Supper.” These
works are courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society’s American Ephemera
Collection in Worcester, MA.
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The appalling answer, from those lips divine,
One of you shall betray me."—
One of these?—
Who by thy hand was nurtured, heard thy prayers,
Received thy teachings, as the thirsty plant
Turns to the rain of summer?—One of these!—
Therefore, with deep and deadly paleness droops
The loved disciple, as if life's warm spring
Chilled to the ice of death, at such strange shock
Of unimagined guilt.—See, his whole soul
Concentered in his eye, the man who walked
The waves with Jesus, all impetuous prompts
The horror-struck inquiry,—" Is it I?
Lord!—Is it I?" while earnest pressing near,
His brother's lip, in ardent echo seems
Doubting the fearful thought.—With brow upraised,
Andrew absolves his soul of charge so foul;
And springing eager from the table's foot,
Bartholomew bends forward, full of hope,
That by his ear, the Master's awful words
Had been misconstrued.—To the side of Christ,
James in the warmth of cherished friendship clings,
Yet trembles as the traitor's image steals
Into his throbbing heart:—while he, whose hand
In sceptic doubt was soon to probe the wounds
Of Him he loved, points upward to invoke
The avenging God.—Philip, with startled gaze,
Stands in his crystal singleness of soul,
Attesting innocence—while Matthew's voice,
Repeating fervently the Master's words,
Rouses to agony the listening group,
Who, half incredulous with terror, seem
To shudder at his accents.
All the twelve
With strong emotion strive, save one false breast
By Mammon seared, which brooding o'er its gain,
Weighs thirty pieces with the Saviour's blood.
Son of perdition!—dost thou freely breathe
In such pure atmosphere?—And canst thou hide,
'Neath the cold calmness of that settled brow,
The burden of a deed whose very name
Thus strikes thy brethren pale?—
But can it be
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That the strange power of this soul-harrowing scene
Is the slight pencil's witchery?—I would speak
Of him who pour'd such bold conception forth
O'er the dead canvas.—But I dare not muse,
Now, of a mortal's praise.—Subdued I stand
In thy sole, sorrowing presence, Son of God!—
I feel the breathing of those holy men,
From whom thy gospel, as on angel's wing,
Went out through all the earth.—I see how deep
Sin in the soul may lurk, and fain would kneel
Low at thy blessed feet, and trembling ask—
"Lord!—is it I?"
For who may tell, what dregs
Do slumber in his breast.—Thou, who didst taste
Of man's infirmities, yet bar his sins
From thine unspotted soul, forsake us not
In our temptations; but so guide our feet,
That our Last Supper in this world may lead
To that immortal banquet by thy side,
Where there is no betrayer.
The sense of the speaker as a mediator between painting and audience is explicit from the
first lines of the poem, though the object of address shifts throughout the poem. In the
first line, the speaker stands between reader and image, guiding readers to “Behold that
countenance.” By the second stanza, this straightforward mediation is complicated as the
speaker addresses the painting itself, and the figure of Christ (“Redeemer! Is it thine”). In
the long third stanza, the address to Christ alternates from the second person (“thy hand,”
“thy teachings”) to the third person (“Jesus,” “the Master,” “Christ”). In the fourth stanza,
the speaker addresses Judas, and then by the end of the poem moves back to Christ.
These frequent shifts create occasional confusion in determining address; the first
question of the fifth stanza, for instance—“But can it be/ That the strange power of this
soul-harrowing scene / Is the slight pencil’s witchery?”—is posed to no one in particular.
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These ambiguities ultimately work to collapse the divide between the image and the
readers, as the speaker inhabits the verbal space of both.
Further dissolving these boundaries is the description of the figures, which relies
largely on emotive postures. In the initial description of Christ, for instance, this figure is
not named, but introduced by the command to “Behold that countenance, where grief and
love / Blend with ineffable benignity, / And deep, unuttered majesty divine.” The
emotional abstractions of “grief and love,” “ineffable benignity,” and “unuttered majesty
divine” frame the anonymous figure, creating an image that is physically
decontextualized but emotionally rich. The description of the twelve disciples, all of
whom “with strong emotion strive” is similarly driven. The description of Peter is
representative: “See, his whole soul / Concentrated in his eye.” Each of the disciples
transparently reveals his thoughts and his distinct personality through his expression.
“The loved disciple,” the child-like John, is “Chilled to the ice of death, at such strange
shock / Of unimagined guilt” while Doubting Thomas, known for his later gesturing
toward Christ’s wound, “points upward to invoke / The avenging God.” In each case
gesture serves only to underline the intensity of an emotional response.
In stressing feeling, the speaker describes an image that is experienced more than
seen. In the second stanza she sees the disciples as “transfixed with horror,” implying a
continuum of emotion before and after this moment. In the fourth stanza, she is able to
“hear” from “those lips divine” the accusation of treachery. Later in the poem this access
becomes even more apparent, as in the penultimate stanza, the speaker notes that
“Subdued I stand / In thy sole, sorrowing presence, Son of God –.” The “presence” of the
figures in the painting is literal, as the speaker “feel[s] the breathing of those holy men,”
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and “see[s] how deep / Sin in the soul may lurk.” Her final gesture, to “kneel / Low at
thy blessed feet, and trembling ask— / Lord!—is it I” presents the same ekphrastic
emulatation that we see culminating in “Picture of an Infant” and “Family Portraits.” As
the speaker fits herself into the poses of the figures of the painting, she models the
culminating moment in the reading of an artwork.
This focus on emotive gesture is only once suspended, in the sixth stanza, when in
a move uncharacteristic of Sigourney’s ekphrasis, the speaker’s confronts the material
form of the artwork. She questions whether the “strange power” of the scene is due to the
individual artist’s powers, his “slight pencil’s witchery”—though her misidentification of
the medium of the work even in this line as “dead canvas” discounts her familiarity with
the original work. The desire to “speak/ Of him who pour’d such bold conception forth”
is, in any case, short-lived, drowned out by a sense that “a mortal's praise” is misplaced in
an work with a sacred subject. This train of thought is abruptly derailed by the speaker’s
ekphrastic emulation—“Subdued I stand / In thy sole, sorrowing presence”—which
brushes the idea of particular aesthetic characteristics or choices aside, moving on instead
to the overwhelming “presence” of the figures in the painting. That the speaker’s
absorption into the space of the image, and her echoing of the disciples’ words is the
gesture that sets these formal concerns aside is revelatory of the function that ekphrastic
emulation ultimately serves. In this stanza, it allows the speaker to “see” and to “feel” the
image more closely, and in the process to efface the moral problem of worshipping at a
“mortal’s” work.
We see this same movement to confront a moral problem, and then to brush it
aside in favor of ekphrastic emulation in the poem’s final stanza. Here, the speaker
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confronts the central moral problem of the painting, Judas’s treachery. The first line of
the stanza, “For who may tell, what dregs / Do slumber in his breast,” introduces Judas’s
sin only to dismiss any further consideration of the issue in turning back to Christ: “Thou,
who didst taste / Of man’s infirmities…”. The poem ends in another moment of
emulation as the speaker asks Christ to guide us so “That our Last Supper in this world
may lead/ to that immortal banquet by thy side, / Where there is no betrayer.” These lines
open the scene of the Last Supper out to the collective audience; it becomes “our Last
Supper,” as we, like the speaker in the previous stanza, imagine an idealized imitation of
the poses in the painting. 40
Both the speaker’s kneeling pose, and “immortal banquet” version of the Last
Supper work by attempting to counteract but not to analyze Judas’s sin. The idealized
Last Supper in the last stanza simply excises Judas. In the pose of the previous stanza, it
is the thought of “how deep /Sin in the soul may lurk” that prompts the speaker to kneel
and utter the words (“Is it I”) that Judas does not speak. In this sense the speaker becomes
a proxy for the thirteenth disciple, a more pious stand-in for the “betrayer.” Ekphrastic
emulation in this poem, then, works as a means of pushing past its central moral
problems, but not of solving them; the re-imagination of images evades the problem of
sin without in any way explaining it. This diffusive function of ekphrasis emulation is
one that we have seen more subtly played out in the previous works, as in “Family
Portraits,” for instance, where both “good” and “bad” moral poses are dealt the same light
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40
Sigourney imagines precisely such a idealized and communal Last Supper
setting in her poem, “On Meeting Students at the Communion Table,” published in the
Girl’s Reading Book (New York: Turner Hughes and Hayden, 1843), 193. In this poem,
Sigourney envisions a reunion with her former students around “a Savior’s board,”
conflating the rites of schooling with the rites of religion. See Loeffelholz 47.
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description, and in “Picture of an Infant,” where the reader’s modeling of the baby’s pose
evades the real moral question of painting’s “luxury.”
At the same time, the speaker’s direct first-person narration in these stanzas is
striking in the context of Sigourney’s canon, where the more inclusive “we” tends to
eclipse the lyric “I.” The insistence of the first person in this poem, though, functions
ultimately not as the subjective assertion of a single speaker, but the echoing of diverse
speakers culminating in a collective group. The repetition of the phrase “Is it I?”
throughout the poem—first by the disciples, then by the poem’s speaker, then, implicitly,
by readers—creates a chorus of voices that the final stanza’s introduction of a collective
“we” (“forsake us not/ In our temptations”) reinforces. The punning on “eye” in the
second and third stanzas in the context of Christ (“Whose is that eye which seems to read
the heart”) and the disciple John (“See his whole soul/ Concentrated in his eye”) also
serves to tie consciousness of self, and even scrutiny of self (“Is it I?”) to vision. Seeing
outwardly is, in this poem as in Sigourney’s ekphrastic canon as a whole, a means toward
internal inspection by speaker and readers alike.
Moving to a more contemporary context changes few of these basic
characteristics. “Powers’s Greek Slave”(1860), a shorter ekphrastic poem centering on
Hiram Powers’ sensationally popular life-sized marble nude, maintains the distanced
abstraction that is the hallmark of Sigourney’s ekphrasis overall. Like the other poems we
have seen so far, Sigourney’s work evades moral prescriptivism—or one could say, moral
clarity—in its emphasis on emotional transfer and spectatorship. And in spite of its
subject’s contemporaneity, the poem reads more as a guide to art viewership than a study
of a particular artwork, much less the most popular, and one of the most controversial
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sculptures of the period. The poem focuses on the act of reading an image to the extent it
entirely elides the issues that made the statue famous, including the situation of African
slaves in America and questions about the propriety of full nudity in sculpture. Even the
statue’s relation to Greek independence, a cause in which Sigourney was actively
involved during the 30s and 40s, shows little real presence in this poem (Haight 30-32).
The poem is clearly not, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetic meditation on the same
artwork, a political statement (Hollander 161-162).
The absence of obvious social issues from the poem, though, does not imply
Sigourney’s disengagement from the writings and responses surrounding the statue. In
fact, the poem in many ways reflects the contemporary treatment of the work and the
artist’s own desire to see his work textually mediated through reading prior to—or
instead of—a gallery visit. Sigourney’s poem participates in the broad outpouring of
ekphrastic poems on the statue that appeared in newspapers, periodicals or other
publications in the years after it toured the U.S. in 1847-48. This popular ekphrastic
canon is only an extension of the mediation that Powers himself saw as necessary to the
statue’s proper reception by the American public, who, the artist feared, might see only
nudity where Neoclassical ideality was intended. These fears were not unfounded:
Horace Greenough had been mocked for his bare-chested depiction of Washington only a
few years before, and Powers had felt the sting of propriety when a prospective buyer of
his Eve Tempted (1842) backed out when accused of “indiscretion” in attempting to
bring a nude sculpture to “quiet, old fashioned, utilitarian” Albany, New York (qtd. in
Kasson 165). The subject of The Greek Slave threatened to meet with the same response:
it was an undraped nude of a young Greek woman—albeit in a modest Classical Venus
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pudica stance—who had been captured by the Turks during the Greek Revolution and
would be sold into sexual slavery. The widespread acclaim of the statue is, more than
anything, a testament to Powers’s careful verbal construction of the work. In interviews
about the statue, he stressed the anonymous figure’s narrative, constructing a history for
the slave that focused on the intensity of her emotional state and was intended to guide
audiences to “best experience the uplifting effects of the pure abstract form.”41 Further
contributing to this effect were the pamphlets that the artist’s friend Miner Kellogg
published to accompany the statue’s 1847-48 American tour, which Kellogg managed.
The pamphlets brought together laudatory poems and reviews published in various
newspapers and magazines, alongside essays of support by clergymen emphasizing the
statue’s propriety and spiritual force.
This textual abstraction of the work makes it an ideal candidate for Sigourney’s
meditation. Like the poetess’s untitled objects of ekphrasis, The Greek Slave is a
constructed in advance as an emotional experience rather than a physical structure. And
like these other works, the original source for Sigourney’s poem is unclear: the
outpouring of poems and prose descriptions of the work in both local and national
publications suggests that Sigourney’s inspiration was (at least in part) textual, while the
possible visual sources were nearly as varied. The December 1857 issue of The
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Kasson 168. For instance: “The slave has been taken from one of the Greek
islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek Revolution; the history of which is familiar
to all. Her father and mother, and perhaps all of her kindred, have been destroyed by her
foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure to valuable to be thrown away. She is now
among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the calamitous
events which have brought her to her present state; and she stands exposed to the gaze of
the people she abhors and awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered by the support of
her reliance upon the goodness of God. Gather all these afflictions together, and add them
to the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, and no room will be left for shame”(qtd in
Kasson 168).
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Cosmopolitan Art Journal, for instance, centers on an announcement that the journal has
bought a copy of the statue to give away to a subscriber in its annual award competition,
and in anticipation of this event, prints several poetic and prose responses to the statue in
addition to some full-page engravings of the work. This same issue includes a biography
of Sigourney extending over two pages, a portrait of the poetess, and her 10-stanza quasiekphrastic poem “Greenwood Cemetery.” It is likely, then, that Sigourney saw this issue
of the journal leading up to the composition of her own poem, but even within this
context, there are several possible sources of influence. 42 Where Sigourney’s relatively
late poem sets itself apart from existing treatments of the work is in presenting the act of
spectatorship as one that, rather than distancing viewers from the Ideal work, brings them
closer to it. “Powers’s Greek Slave” both engages contemporary treatments, and stresses
the interchangeability of the spectator and the artwork that is a central factor of
Sigourney’s ekphrastic canon.
Contemporary dialogues around the work and emotional exchange both come into
play from the poem’s first line: “Be silent! Breathe not! Lest ye break the trance.”
Entrancement was a common means of describing audiences of the statue, who writers
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This issue of the journal also strikingly highlights the tension between
materiality and ideality in descriptions of the statue. While the poems in the issue focus
on the Ideal beauty of the figure, some of the prose pieces enter into the relative crassness
of the contemporary art world. The Art Journal’s reprinting of letters exchanged between
the artist and the statue’s auctioneers, for instance, highlights the uncomfortable tendency
for the sale of the work to mimic the very process that it is meant to resist. The
auctioneer’s account of the sale, which “not less than four or five thousand persons”
attended, and the final bidding price of six thousand dollars to the Cosmopolitan Art
Association effectively counteracts the hyper-spiritualized accounts of the work in the
poems of the same issue. The Art Journal itself frames these letters with an eerie
personification: “Verily ‘the Greek’ is having a varied fortune! She is now reposing
quietly in the midst of noble companion-works, but only for a while; some subscriber to
the Association will bear her off”(40).
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typically depicted as silenced and awe-struck. As a review from the 1847 New York
Courier and Enquirer notes: “It is extremely interesting to watch the effect which the
statue has upon all who come before it. Its presence is a magic circle within whose
precincts all are held spell-bound and almost speechless”(qtd. in Kellogg 26).43 Such a
“spell-bound” state often also applies to viewer descriptions of the statue itself. Most
contemporary reviewers note the statue’s attitude of introspection: “the intense
concentration of the brows, the resolution of the lips, and the sad abstraction of the
features generally”(qtd. in Kellogg 27). H.T. Tuckerman’s poem on the work even
comments on the “rich and dreamy languor [that] holds thee in a grateful trance”(qtd in
Kellogg 21). The “trance” of Sigourney’s first line can then refer to both audience and
artwork. Emotion, even at this early point in the poem, is a free-floating entity.
The rest of the first stanza focuses on the statue’s trance-like absorption in
abstracted memory, and the speaker’s access to this emotion:
She thinketh of her Attic home; the leaves
Of its green olives stir within her soul,
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qtd. in Kellogg 26. The hushing also recalls Sigourney’s idea that a restraint of
one sense intensifies the experience of another; absolute silence is for Sigourney a
signifier of deep artistic appreciation. This sense is clearly evident in the handful of
poems that Sigourney published through the 1830s to the 1850s dealing with students
suffering from, to use her term, the “afflictions” of deafness, muteness, and blindness.
These poems create an interesting distinction between those suffering the absence of a
single sense, and those who bear “affliction’s thrice-wreathed chain” of deafness,
muteness and blindness. Sigourney generally depicts the loss of a single sense in a
positive light, as a limitation which can sharpen other sensations and even focus the mind,
while she shows a triple-loss as emotionally and spiritually limiting. “Marriage of the
Deaf and Dumb,” for instance, Sigourney presents deafness sharpening the fitting
solemness of marriage, and forcing guests to avoid the frivolous entertainments that often
cheapen the rite. The first line of this poem strikingly echoes the first line of “Power’s
Statue of a Greek Slave”: “No word! No sound! But yet a solemn rite / Proceedeth
through the festive lighted hall.” Here, as in “Greek Slave,” the absence of sound only
intensifies the visual and contemplative aspects of the scene.!
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And Love is sweeping o’er its deepest chords
So mournfully. Ah! Who can weigh the wo
Or wealth of memory in that breast sublime!
The memories that the speaker can retrieve from the statue’s “soul” are intangible
feelings rather than fully-formed images. The concept of “Love…sweeping o’er its
deepest chords / So mournfully” is wholly abstract: the referent of “its” is unclear and
“chords” has several seemingly applicable definitions. (Fittingly, one of these definitions
is “a feeling or emotion,” as in the phrase “touched a chord” that Sigourney likewise uses
in “Family Portraits”). The last line of the stanza—“Who can weigh the wo / Or wealth
of memory in that breast sublime!”—underlines the unquantifiable nature of the thought
that the speaker accesses, set in implicit contrast to the more tangible elements of that
slave’s presentation, the physical details that Sigourney’s description carefully avoids.
This sense of the statue’s emotional weight contributed significantly to its
popularity. Viewers generally understood that the figure inspiring the statue was destined
for the Turkish harems that drew exoticist fascination. In choosing to depict a moment of
contemplative repose between the violence of her past capture and the degradation of her
future, Powers allowed viewers to experience the emotional power of the scene without
any—or too much— indelicacy: “[Powers’] Greek slave pauses on the threshold of a
momentous change in her life; her future in the harem is the great unstated drama that
gives the sculpture its poignancy”(Kasson 171). Unlike many of the other artistic
depictions of the harem in the early nineteenth century, the violence and sensuality of
Powers’ scene remains implicit. This subtlety ties the statue to Sigourney’s general
predilection for moments of moral introspection posed between moments of action,
which we see develop in the poem’s next stanza:
**!
!
Yet errs he not who calleth thee a slave,
Thou Christian maiden?
Gyves are on thy wrists;
But in thy soul a might of sanctity
That foils the oppressor, making to itself
A hiding-place from the sore ills of time.
The “sanctity” of the figure’s soul in the fourth line is embedded between the
“gyves” on her wrists in the third line and the “oppressor” in the fifth line. Because “to
foil,” has the secondary connotations of dishonoring or deflowering, this fifth line
gestures toward the slave’s future, while the “gyves” of the third point back to the
moment of her capture. The “sanctity” of her soul, signified in Powers’s statue by a cross
dangling from her wrist, is the meditative stance that links and undoes the violence of
both the past and the future. This emphasis on Christian contemplation reverses the
power dynamic of slave and captor, finding in interiority the “hiding place” that reality
does not provide.
In the final lines of the poem, Sigourney similarly flips the positions of viewer
and art-object:
What is the chain to thee, who hast the power
To bind in admiration all who gaze
Upon thine eloquent brow and matchless form?
We are ourselves thy slaves, most Beautiful!
With this final assertion, the transformation that began in the poem’s first line with the
order to “Be silent!” is complete. As speechless viewers, we are reduced to the power of a
“gaze” while the art-object, with her “eloquent brow,” has gained the power of
expression. Her physical chains become meaningless in light of her spiritual powers,
while our actual freedoms become immaterial in light of the bonds of our helpless
“admiration.” That the statue is able to “bind” us by her beauty signals that our own
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transformation into art-object is complete. Not only are we chained in the act of gazing,
but we are silent and breathless, aestheticized slaves like the simple art-object we thought
we were encountering. This transformation once again encapsulates Sigourney’s most
basic principle of art spectatorship, that an audience can read a work only by embodying
it.
This viewing model had particular resonances with female antebellum audiences.
The connection between women’s bodies and the marble nudes of Classical statuary was
commonly made during this period, fueled in part by prescriptive literature and women’s
magazines which used classical figures as models of fashion, hairstyle, and correct
posture. Images of the Venus de Medici as the natural, straight-spined woman became a
commonplace in the anti-corseting movement to which Sigourney and many others
contributed. The connection could cause self-consciousness for the female viewer of
statuary, who had only recently been permitted into galleries of sculpture (Winterer 1578). It also, however, permitted women to take on the novel position of natural
connoisseurs. Clara Cushman, for instance, in her review of The Greek Slave, calls it “a
work which only [women] can truly appreciate”(qtd. in Kellogg 29). In her article on the
statue, Joy Kasson notes a similar phenomenon in regard to one of the engravings that
appeared in the December 1857 issue of The Cosmopolitan Art Journal, showing the
statue in the Dusseldorf gallery: “Unlike other depictions of art spectatorship published at
the same time, this engraving shows women actively looking at the sculpture, appearing
to explain and interpret it to their male companions, who look not at the sculpture but at
them. The sculpture appears larger than life, and its proximity enlivens the women who
surround it” (183). The women in the engraving, in other words, take on precisely the
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didactic roles that works such as Sigourney’s ekphrasis primes them for—even as they
themselves become elements in an artistic image.
This image of didactic poses transported into the gallery aligns perfectly with
Sigourney’s own model of viewership. Sigourney’s ekphrasis, which stresses emotion
and gesture over a particularized object, and places emphasis on the disembodied “eye”
of spectatorship over the individual perception of the speaker’s “I,” makes art available to
anyone willing to enter into its imaginative space. This entrance, though, requires that
readers consider the sight of the image as a direct encounter, a movement that was at the
time of Sigourney’s writing both nostalgic and forward-looking. On the one hand, it drew
on a model of schooling, based in home education, that was becoming increasingly
outmoded. On the other, it foresaw a means of transferring the emotional bonds of pupil
and teacher to a depersonalized print sphere. And in so doing, it found also found
application in the museum culture that, as the massive success of The Greek Slave’s U.S.
tour indicated, would have an increasing part in the American art world. In this sense,
then, even as Sigourney’s ekphrasis did not reflect the gallery culture of her own time, it
could anticipate a moment later in the century when this sphere too would align with the
inclusive spirit of her own sentimentalized art objects.
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Chapter Two
“Folded Up In A Veil”: Sophia Hawthorne’s Familial Ekphrasis and the
Antebellum Travelogue
Introduction
A few pages from the end of her travelogue Notes in England and Italy (1868), on
a final return to Rome in the homeward leg of her journey, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne
muses about the ways that her mid-life travels in Italy have altered her youthful, idealized
image of the city and its history. In her early imagination, spurred on by schoolroom
lessons of imperial domination, “A Roman never ate, or rather I did not think of his
eating. I supposed he lived on glory, a kind of whip syllabub which I now know could not
make sinews… My eyes were holden, so that I could not see the sin or the shame; or a
prism was over them, through which the Empire flashed with the seven colors which light
paints rainbows”(543). Her later residence in Rome, and her travel through England,
France and Italy from 1853 to 1860 “destroyed my fancies,” complementing the vision of
militaristic glory with a dark vision of cruelty and destruction, masking the natural and
artistic beauties of the city in the constant threat of malarial death. But despite this
disillusionment, Hawthorne remained entranced, and Rome maintained the larger part of
its allure. On her final carriage-ride through the city with her family, she considers this
contradictory attraction: “What, then, is this Rome that will hold sway over mankind,
whether or no, in past and present time? I have an idea, but it is folded up in a veil, and I
cannot take this moment to answer my question” (544).
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This evasive suggestion does not provide any concrete insight into Rome’s power,
but does offer an apt metaphor for the function of Hawthorne’s own text. The language of
Hawthorne’s earlier sightlessness suggests the coming of a quasi-religious revelation, but
her almost cavalier dismissal of her idea (“I cannot take this moment…”) frustrates these
expectations.44 The journal concludes inconclusively several pages later. What the reader
is left with is the image of the veil in which naked insight is “folded up,” an image that
strikingly echoes Sophia’s own earlier discussion of her writing in describing a central
artwork of the text, Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola. In this passage, after noting that
the painting “surpasses entirely all the copies in oil and all engravings” Sophia makes a
similar complaint of her own ekphrastic attempts: “This work transcends any power I
possess of conveying it to the mind of another. My words seem poor rags, with which I
endeavor to clothe the idea—heaps of rags—the more I try, the larger the heaps”(354-55).
Rather than revealing, the writing obscures, producing a creative but undefined space
between the viewer and the art object: a veil, albeit a ragged one. This veiled
intermediary is additionally charged, at the late point of Sophia’s writing, with a strong
association to her husband’s literary production. But the veiling of Notes is characterized
by its own terms rather than Nathaniel’s, even as the text introduces familial context in
order to establish these specifications.
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Note: I refer to the Hawthornes throughout this chapter by their first names to
avoid confusion.
44
When a couple on the road to Emmaus three days after Christ’s crucifixion
encounter this figure, they do not recognize him because “their eyes were holden.” When
he later blesses their bread “their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished
from their sight”(King James Version, Luke 24.13-32).
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The middle ground between two terms is in Notes its own form of demure
revelation. Unlike in Nathaniel’s canon, where the veil between figures is a choice or an
imposition that separates the public world and the private self, the veil in Sophia’s
travelogue complicates the gendered categories of original/copy and public/ private that
formed an important part of the antebellum vocabulary of artistry. Sophia’s simultaneous
reliance on and resistance to these binaries in Notes brings about the gradual development
of an alternative model of creativity that is by the nature of its terms invested in questions
of gender. As Claire Badaracco writes, Sophia was part of “that last generation of the
women of pre-industrial American society…where girls were educated in front parlors,
‘reading’ was commonly understood to mean elocution, ‘composition’ was making
copies, and ‘writing’ was primarily an exercise in journals and copy-books”(96, italics
Badaracco). Antebellum women writers—from Frances Osgood to Lydia Sigourney to
Fanny Fern—were strongly associated with such mimicry and mimesis. Visual copyists
were likewise feminized and women’s association with the private sphere of the family
was a platitude of the era’s discourse.45 By complicating these associations with copying
and private space in Notes, Sophia carves out a space for herself as an artist that is not
either/or but both/and. Its excessiveness is— like Rome itself— alluring, mysterious, and
at times simply baffling. If Italy, in Sophia’s inconclusive conclusion, does preserve its
mysteries, that is because “the answer” lies not in the unidealized, unveiled Roman who
is subject to our gaze, but rather in the more subtle folds of the veil itself.46
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45
For a discussion of mimesis and women’s writing, see for instance Eliza
Richards, especially 1-28; Lara Langer Cohen 130-161. For the gendering of the copyist
in the nineteenth century see Aviva Briefel, especially 19-53.
46
This reading follows and expands on Annamaria Formichella Elsden’s point at
the end of her essay “Watery Angels” that “the veil itself, rather than what it covers, is
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In this chapter, I focus particularly on the convergence of public/private spaces
and original/copied artworks in Notes’ ekphrastic descriptions. A painter and copyist who
had exhibited work at the Boston Athenaeum and trained with some of the most
prominent painters of her day, Sophia devoted a large portion of her travel writing to
detailed descriptions of individual artworks.47 These descriptions openly question the
nature of artistic originality, and often contrast the original works described to the works
of copyists who have reproduced the compositions. At the same time, Sophia’s famous
last name and the implied presence of her family members give these descriptions a
heightened charge of biographical revelation. Notes explicitly takes as its central aim the
presentation of the “Great Masters in Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting” to a broader
public, but the public documentation of a notoriously private family’s life was at least
partially responsible for the wide readership that the book was able to obtain (Notes 3).
Sophia, like many nineteenth-century women, had from her youth written hundreds of
pages of journal writing that was circulated among an audience of family and friends but
not formally published. This writing takes part in what Noelle Baker calls “a ‘third sphere’
of public discourse, a social realm that mediates ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres” (24). But
as I will argue in this paper, a sort of “third sphere” is also distinguishable in published
work such as Notes. By alluding to private events through a public commentary, Sophia
creates a document that is both a familial and an artistic record, both a private and public
document. Sophia’s ekphrastic descriptions— and the excisions and emendations that
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the answer. By leaving the veil unlifted, Sophia points toward the representation—the
veil in which she envelops her Italian experience in order to share it with readers – rather
than the experience”(142-43).!
47
For Sophia’s exhibition of Landscape in 1834, see Marshall 264-70. For
Sophia’s lessons with Francis Graeter, Thomas Doughty, and Chester Harding in 1829-30
see 205-11.
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these descriptions underwent as she prepared the journal for publication— reveal not just
a concern for the divisions between copy and original, but a preoccupation with the often
needling or idiosyncratic distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private material. The
resulting document works fragmentary glimpses of private life into publicly accessible art
descriptions, disturbing the boundary between artistic copy and original. In so doing, it
claims for ekphrasis a space that is both derivative and strikingly original, publicly
anodized and privately allusive.
The significance of Sophia’s re-evaluation of originality lies both in its reframing
of her own text, and in its reframing of the derivative traits commonly associated with
women’s writing. Critics often see Sophia’s writing as a reflection of Nathaniel’s persona
and concerns, a perspective that the pair’s closely entwined domestic and intellectual
lives seem to support.48 This conception has not been to Sophia’s favor in modern
criticism, though it may have served her well in the past. As T. Walker Herbert suggests,
“Sophia Hawthorne is the most vilified wife in American literary history, after having
been in her own time the most admired”(37). Sophia, hailed as the maternal ideal of
America’s most celebrated writer during her own lifetime, has been more difficult to
redeem as a figure of independent interest than other writers or artists less closely bound
by their familial associations. But it is precisely these familial associations and her
reaction to them in Notes that highlight the originality of her own writing. In looking at
Notes in relation to the manuscript journal on which it is based, it becomes clear that for
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48
This critical perspective began with Julian Hawthorne’s consideration of Sophia
as having “lived for her husband” and that continues even into Nina Baym’s assertion
that “had given up whatever public ambition she might have had in exchange for drawing
her life’s meaning from Hawthorne’s life.” See Hall 137-138 for an overview of this
work.
,(!
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Sophia, editing— the activity for which she has been most maligned in relation to
Nathaniel’s work— allows her to transform a direct non-fictional account into an original,
aestheticized production.49 Sophia’s editorial attentions are not merely expressive of an
over-developed propriety, but express at least equally a sense of the unique contribution
of her own text. In this chapter I argue that even as the travelogue conforms to many of
the conventions of travel writing, and even as it grapples with some of the same issues as
Nathaniel’s writing on art, the conclusions that it reaches on these issues offer new
possibilities for the position of the copyist, literary or visual. In the course of mapping out
the specific points of Sophia’s ideas on derivation and originality, ekphrasis, apparently
the most derivative form of feminine writing, also takes on a new field of possibility.
Women’s Travel Writing and Its Baggage
Critics have analyzed the place of private and public spaces in women’s writing,
and in women’s travel writing more specifically, in ways that strikingly echo Sophia’s
own concerns about the role of the female author. Most notably, Richard Brodhead
conceptualizes the opposing demands of the public and private spheres for midnineteenth century American authors through the symbol of the Veiled Lady. This
popular antebellum performer was both “a creature of physical invisibility,” completely
hidden by her veil, and one of “pure exhibitionism”(51), whose work on stage brought
her continuously before the public to answer its questions with apparent clairvoyance.
Similarly, the rise of mass print brought female writers into the public sphere in
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49
See for instance Stewart, “Introduction” ix-xxi on Sophia’s revisions in
Hawthorne’s The English Notebooks. Marta Werner and Nicholas Lawrence present a
more sympathetic treatment of Sophia’s editing practices in their analysis of her work on
the common journal.
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unprecedented ways, even as it broadcast an understanding of the women’s sphere as
“dephysicalized and deactivated domestic privacy”(53). The Veiled Lady is for Brodhead
a symbol for the best-selling authors and entertainers of mid-century, public figures like
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner whose books both propagated and were
enabled by a vision of the home as a private space of leisure. These celebrity figures and
their works represented to their readership “a public embodiment of a fascinating private
life”(63), an unprecedentedly accessible vision of individual subjectivity.
Brodhead’s starting point for analysis is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale
Romance, a novel that furnished antebellum readers with their most famous literary
Veiled Lady in the character of Priscilla. Critics have seen biographical resonances
between Priscilla and Sophia; Sophia certainly confronted the contradictory demands of a
public existence both before and after her marriage.50 But unlike Nathaniel’s
representation of this figure, who as Brodhead writes, is talentless, “a victim of her
display” exploited by handlers, Sophia makes her own (albeit conflicted) decisions about
the extent of her public appearance (55). In her youth, she saw her older sister Elizabeth
Palmer Peabody struggle to support the family through careers in teaching, writing, and
publishing, all the while remaining in the shadow of the figures her writing promoted.
Sophia, afflicted throughout her lifetime with debilitating migraines that had been
exacerbated by childhood mercury “cures,” was to a large extent freed from these
financial demands (Marshall 73-4). But given the literary circles in which her family
moved, and her position as the wife of a celebrated author, publicity was never far
removed. When her sister Elizabeth read among her wide circle of friends journal entries
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50
See for instance Sandra Whipple Spanier 59.
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that Sophia sent home from Cuba, Sophia chided her and reported feeling “as if the
nation were feeling my pulse”(280). The letters, which were eventually bound by the
family into a three-volume, 785-page “Cuba Journal,” were never published, though
Elizabeth had encouraged Sophia to edit them for the American Monthly (280-81). When
Nathaniel and Sophia first met, he borrowed the volumes for more than a month, copying
passages into his own notebooks, and on their return pronouncing Sophia “the Queen of
Journalizers”(362). He nonetheless supported her reticence toward publication later in
their relationship, praising her in 1856 for having “never prostituted thyself to the public”
by appearing in print, and opining that authorship “seem[s] to me to deprive women of all
delicacy”(Hall 139). When Nathaniel’s editor James Fields approached Sophia in 1859
about publishing her English and Italian letters and journals, she continued to insist that
Nathaniel alone was “the Belleslettres portion of my being”(138). But published or not,
Sophia was an undeniably public literary figure, and after her husband’s death in 1864,
did print sections from these travel notebooks in addition to Nathaniel’s American and
European journals. Two passages from her British letters first appeared in the September
and October 1869 Putnam’s Magazine, and then the full Notes was released by the same
publishing house later that year.
Notes is particularly salient from the perspective of Sophia’s conflicted public
persona, because if women writers found their public and private selves conflated, the
travelogue exaggerated this conflation. A travel narrative not only purports to publicize
the autobiographical experience of an author, it does so in the very public context of the
cities, monuments, and museums of international destinations. Whatever the limited
public roles of their authors, these works are primarily studies of public space. The
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numbers of women’s travelogues dramatically increased in the course of the nineteenth
century, becoming, by the 1850s a genre in development. Before the 1820s, women’s
travel outside of the U.S. was for the most part what Mary Schriber characterizes as
“accidental”(2), undertaken to accompany male family members, who most frequently
traveled for work rather than leisure. The invention of steam-powered ships in the 1820s
encouraged women’s leisure travel, even independent of male escorts; the luxurious
‘steam palaces’ of the 1860s furthered this trend. Women’s writing remained “accidental”
in style even as the travel that occasioned it became increasingly purposeful. Only 27
women’s travelogues were published before the Civil War, in contrast to the 168 that
appeared after the War. The books of this earlier period are characterized by informality;
they are “letters written by homemakers for private consumption, and later cobbled into
travel books” rather than the professional newspaper or magazine correspondences that
emerged later in the century (3). The very informality of this work, though, highlights the
intimacy of its writers with their original curtailed audiences, and heightens the
voyeurism of more general readers in consuming private letters and journals. As if to
mitigate this exposure, authors often prefaced these travelogues with modest protestations
of their reluctance to publish, and placed responsibility on friends and family members
for engineering the move (4).
In this same vein, many women’s travelogues from this era negotiate public space
through the lens of domesticity. Travel writing was often a means of reflecting back on
the “home”— both the private domestic circle and native country— from the luxury of
distance. In this sense, many of these works challenge the strict binaries between public
and domestic, inserting reflections on home into descriptions of their destinations, and
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reflecting on the differences between foreign and native perceptions of private space.
These reflections could be either liberating or limiting.51 In some cases, even as women
traveled abroad, their accounts of these travels were shaped by the home and conceptions
of their “proper province”(Caesar 58). Sarah Haight describes her domestic camp in the
Egyptian desert, while Harriet Beecher Stowe dwells on the “bed room, dining room,
sitting room” of Robert the Bruce’s caves (Robertson 219). This domesticization of
public spaces comes in direct contrast to the frequent sexualization of travel and foreign
lands in the travelogues of male writers. If Italy, for instance, was allegorized by male
travelers on the Grand Tour as both “frivolously beautiful” and “feminized,” the object of
sexual conquest, for female writers, the land’s domestication became a means of ensuring
readers of the traveler’s protection from sexual threat (Roman Fever 5).
Sophia’s Notes, from its first pages, participates in many of these generic
conventions, though it not entirely clear to what extent this participation is purely formal.
The preface, for instance, begins with a stock protestation of unwillingness to publish that
ties the author’s voice firmly in the private sphere and suggests the extenuating
circumstances of her publication:
I think it necessary to say that these “Notes,” written twelve years ago, were never
meant for publication; but solely for my own reflection, and for a means of
recalling to my friends what had especially interested me abroad. Many of these
friends have repeatedly urged me to print them, from a too partial estimate of their
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51
Schriber sees women’s travel writing, through Nina Baym, as a means of
breaking down “whatever imaginative and intellectual boundaries their culture may have
been trying to maintain between domestic and public worlds”(8) and argues that “from
the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, writing home
from abroad meant writing—and rewriting—‘home’”(9). Susan Robertson similarly
reads women’s travel writing as “a negotiation” struck “between new freedoms and
traditional ideas and practices of feminine comportment, between the road and
home”(218).
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value; and I have steadily resisted the suggestion, until now, when I reluctantly
yield. (3).
Sophia’s descriptive writing was much admired among her inner circle; Nathaniel wrote
to William Ticknor during the family’s time abroad that “Mrs. Hawthorne altogether
excels me as a writer of travels” (Hall 138). But there is evidence that it was Nathaniel,
rather than Sophia, who most strongly “resisted” the publication of Notes. When Fields
proposed the publication in 1859, Sophia asserted dramatically that “nothing less than the
immediate danger of starvation for my husband and children would induce me to put
myself between a pair of book covers”(Hall 138). A contemporaneous letter to Elizabeth,
however, points to Nathaniel as the source of resistance. In discussing Fields’ proposal,
Sophia writes dutifully of her decision “not to argue the matter any further with Mr.
Hawthorne” and to “postpone all my own possibilities in the way of art”(Hall 139). This
deferral provides an answer to the open question of the preface: why, after twelve years,
did Sophia “reluctantly yield”? Critics have traditionally pointed to the financial straights
of the years after Nathaniel’s death for an answer, and Sophia’s ambiguity in the preface
may have intended to hint in this direction. But the letter to Elizabeth suggests that
personal artistic fulfillment, deferred during Nathaniel’s lifetime, was at least equally at
stake.52
Certainly, the way that Sophia represented private and public life in Notes was
carefully considered and curated. For Sophia, the experience of an art object enfolded
within it the familial and personal trappings that influenced her perception of the work.
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52
For a discussion of the Hawthornes’ financial straights and Sophia’s
publication, see for instance Mary Schriber 122-23; Thomas Woodson 733-734. For an
extended analysis of Sophia’s aesthetic commitment to Notes, including an examination
of the family’s financial situation in the late 1860s, see Julie Hall 140-41.
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This influence is clear from the Italian journals on which the Roman and Florentine
sections of Notes are based. These journals record images of the children alongside of
sketches from great works, and descriptions of the children likewise accompany passages
of ekphrasis (Journal Vol. 1-5). In the published edition of Notes, these private
interruptions are curtailed, to the extent that Edwin Miller could complain that “her
descriptions constitute a rather prosaic and impersonal travelogue…When Sophia was
writing about the home, she was at her best”(202). A close examination of the
descriptions in Notes, though, reveals that Sophia is precisely “writing about the home,”
if only indirectly. The volume is dedicated to “Elizabeth P. Peabody” from “her sister,
S.H.,” and the name that appears on the title page is simply “Mrs. Hawthorne.” More
explicit familial references get swallowed up in the descriptions of images themselves,
haunting artworks in ways that point at the private significance of public works. The last
lines of the preface draw these connections out: “If [these Notes] will aid any one in the
least to enjoy, as I have enjoyed, the illustrious works of the Great Masters in
Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, I shall be well repaid for the pain it has cost me to
appear before the public”(3). The focus of the text is on the “Great Masters,” but it is
Sophia herself who feels exposed. Family makes only a secondary appearance in Notes,
but it is to family that the work is dedicated and doubtless in part because of these
connections that the travelogue went through 8 editions in the 14 years following its
publication.53 At the same time, that artworks are the primary means by which this
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53
See Hall 137. The extent to which familial associations were responsible for the
success of Sophia’s book is of course difficult to track precisely. Sophia’s contemporaries,
though, were direct about the work’s connections. As a review of the second edition in
1870 begins, “That the magic of Hawthorne’s name would attract many readers to this
volume, and that some passages would acquire especial interest through him, might be
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private space gets worked out suggests that ekphrasis’s seemingly narrow and mimetic
function couches much broader goals.
The Art of the Travelogue
Ekphrastic descriptions were a major component of antebellum travelogues, so
much so that Catherine Maria Sedgwick could write in the preface to her 1841 travel
narrative that “I was aware that our stayers-at-home had already something too much of
churches, statues, and pictures, and yet that they cannot well imagine how much they
make up the existence of tourists in the Old World” (viii). Sedgwick’s terming as
“familiar things” the “churches, statues, and pictures” that by the 40s an elite minority of
Americans had seen firsthand speaks both to the strong market presence of the travelogue
and to the almost stock ekphrastic representation of these objects.
In spite of this predominance, though, and in spite of the extensive critical
treatment of the travel writing phenomenon, ekphrasis as a component of early American
travelogue has received little extended theoretical treatment. Critics have tended to see
ekphrasis, following Sedgwick’s terms, as a more or less transparent (and often
somewhat boring) description of objects. This description, by nature of its transparency,
does not demand the theorization of more complex issues such as nationalism or
gender.54 Meanwhile, the accounts of ekphrasis that exist outside of the travelogue,
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expected; but the individual and intrinsic merit of the book will be a real surprise to those
who learn, for the first time, of the intellectual companionship he must have found in his
wife”(“Current Literature” 294).
54
Alfred Bendixen and Terry Caesar both see nationalism as the unifying
preoccupation of American travelers from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Mary
Schriber and Susan Robertson, in their work on 19th century American women’s
travelogues, see domesticity and relations to the home as the primary concern.
+&!
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however well they may apply to the Romantic and Modernist works that are their
principle focus, map awkwardly onto women’s travel writing. Ekphrasis, as theorized by
critics such as W.J.T. Mitchell and James Heffernan, is a gendered competition between
the representative powers of the (masculine) text and the (feminine) art object. This
formulation is unlikely to elucidate the situation of women writers, or writers who see in
visual work an object to be translated for a broader public. As Mitchell writes of his own
framework, “All this would look quite different…if my emphasis had been on ekphrastic
poetry by women”(181).
Sophia’s art-centered travelogue can help us to formulate the nature of this
difference. An unassuming description in Notes, tagged almost offhandedly at the end of
a day of sightseeing in Florence, provides a framework for considering ekphrasis
specifically tailored to the text. “In the University halls,” Sophia writes, “we saw a very
singular work. I supposed it to be an engraving of Raphael’s Belle Jardinière [sic], but the
custode told us that it was all composed of almost microscopically small words, written
with a pen”(328). A word-painting that is both a copy of Raphael’s original and “a very
singular work,” the pen drawing is an original conception in its own right. As an image
comprised of words, it provides an elegant metaphor for the originary ekphrasis that
Sophia undertakes in Notes. The journal entry ends abruptly on this last line, and Sophia
does not describe what the “small words” that make up the Raphael copy spell out. But
this withholding too is fitting: like her own ekphrastic text, which conceals beneath its
surface the intricacies of family life, and which gives up only the larger outline of her
descriptive copy, the image of Raphael’s Belle Jardinière presents its external form to
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casual viewers and hints only “microscopically” at the run of its internal text. This
curated interweaving of public and private is precisely what defines the work as
“singular.”
Sophia’s consideration of the copy in Notes builds gradually to a theory of
ekphrasis: her analysis of the aims and ideals of the copy reveals much about the goals of
her own art description. On the one hand, there is a strong preservationist streak to the
work, apparent in the prefatory aim to “aid any one in the least to enjoy, as I have
enjoyed, the illustrious works of the Great Masters”(3). Similarly, Sophia’s frequent
commentary on the poor preservation of Old Master works and her recurrent allusions to
the work of visual copyists suggests that one goal of her artistic descriptions is simply to
maintain a record of these delicate works. While her judgment of painted copies of
original works is often harsh, in cases where the copies are faithful, Sophia embraces
their utility in the task of artistic dissemination. As she writes of one frescoed room in
Perugia: “A young artist was sitting there, copying the groups and single figures with a
lead pencil, in an extraordinary manner, and with the utmost fidelity. He, and others as
accomplished and faithful, should be commissioned to save in imperishable lines the
vanishing masterpieces of fresco-painting”(320). The fragility of fresco in particular, and
primitiveness of nineteenth-century preservation techniques in general, makes the good
copy the most reliable means of salvaging painted works that often appears to be
disappearing before viewers’ eyes.55 For these “faithful” artists commissioned to
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Sophia occasionally comments in Notes on botched attempts at artistic
preservation, as in this description of a Raphael self-portrait: “It is said that Raphael’s
eyes in this picture were once blue and the hair fair, and that the cleaners have retouched
them and made them dark…Picture cleaners are often the destruction instead of the
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undertake this preservation, dedication to the task must be such that personal volition is
consumed by channeling the spirit of the original work. The good copyist in Sophia’s text
“should be informed with the feeling and the secret of the soul that wrought the wonder,
or they only hide the masterpiece they pretend to repeat”(260).
Given Sophia’s work as an artist and copyist, it seems particularly congruous to
think of her written text as taking on the same preservationist function as good visual
copies. This parallel, however, is complicated by Sophia’s struggles with the terms
original and copy, both in her own artistic production and within the text of Notes. In
Sophia’s life, the seeds for her pilgrimage to Italy were planted 30 years before, when the
then-unmarried aspiring artist completed a copy of a landscape painting by Washington
Allston. Declaring it the first time she had “felt satisfied with a copy” Sophia described
the process of this painting as not simply a reproduction of forms, but as a “bodying forth
the poet’s dream—Creation!”(Marshall 228). The work made the 26 year-old Sophia a
minor celebrity in Boston, and eventually brought even Allston himself to her home
studio. The wise old man of American painting praised the copy and laid out for Sophia
his advice for a young artist’s education, which took as its model his youthful
apprenticeship in England and Italy, and included both drawing from nature and from
masterworks. But for Allston, steeped in a Neoclassical tradition that valued history
painting as the highest form of the medium, the advice to copy other works was only the
means to the end of creating “original” compositions (229-231). Sophia generally shared
in this idea. Most of the works she produced in her lifetime were copies, but she held the
creation of “original” work— images that she had seen neither in nature or in other
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restorers of works of art”(375). For more on nineteenth-century art restoration and its
critics see Briefel 84-114.
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works— up as an aesthetic ideal. When Sophia for instance painted eight small
landscapes for an 1833 Salem fundraiser, she wrote to her sisters proudly that “Four of
them I created!!!!!!!”— meaning that she had improvised the compositions, rather than
copying them from existinf works (Marshall 265). At the same time, her exclamation that
the Allston copy embodied “the poet’s dream—Creation!” implies a distinction between
copy and original significantly more conflicted than Allston’s. Rather than seeing the
copy as simply a stage in the progression toward mature artistic work, Sophia appreciated
gradations of quality within the category, and understood the copy as capable of
expressing a form of originality.
This conflict is readily apparent in Notes. Copyists haunt Sophia’s museum
setting as they do the settings of many nineteenth-century museum accounts, but in her
hands the shadowy figures shift constantly.56 Some fail utterly at their task, as one copyist
imitating Michelangelo’s Three Fates “badly,” creating a copy that “will deceive
somebody” who has not seen the original work (369). Others Sophia damns with faint
praise, as one copyist emulating Guido’s Archangel in the Church of the Capuchins who
“has entirely missed the face and the sway of the attitude, but had succeeded pretty well
with the right foot and limb”(258). Some, as we have seen, copy “with the utmost
fidelity,” and so “should be commissioned to save in imperishable lines the vanishing
masterpieces”(320). But most compellingly, some artists outperform the originals that
they set out to imitate, and in so doing, create a work that transcends its descriptive
qualities. Sophia encounters several such artists, including one at a large Nativity scene
by Gherardo della Notte whose copy “had the depth of an abyss in it, and the dazzle of
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56
For background on the copyist in nineteenth-century literature, see Aviva
Briefel 1-53.
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light from the Holy Child was truly spiritual, far finer in effect than that of the original
picture”(479). All of these varied assessments of copyists present more than an overview
of the potential of visual mimesis: they suggest the range of aesthetic failure or success
for Sophia’s own text.
Sophia holds her own prose in the travelogue to the same standards that she
applies to the visual copyist. The analogy between the visual and the textual copy is, in
her manuscript journals, very literal: her descriptions of images are often accompanied by,
and explicitly refer to, sketches that also copy some detail of the artwork.57 That these
textual descriptions find themselves in some of the same conflicts that Sophia lays out for
the visual copy, then, is not surprising. Notes is, in its most basic sense, conservationist,
recording descriptions of works that often seemed on the verge of disappearance; as
Annamaria Eldsen suggests, “the written word of Sophia’s text may be her attempt to
transcend time’s destructive power and offer to a reading public ‘lines’ that will not
fade.”(Roman Fever 87). As part of the task of conservation, these descriptions are
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57
In fact, Sophia at times attempts to maintain this connection between text and
image in the published text, which does not reproduce any of her sketches. In a March 25,
1858 entry in the first volume of the Roman manuscript journal, she writes of two
sculptures: “Marc Anthony has a strong head and face with a great force of will in it—
Lepidus is very weak— with small features, a profile tending thus – ” After the “thus,” on
the edge of the sheet is a pen drawing about the size of a nickel, showing a man with
curly hair’s profile, a triangle superimposed on his profiled features to emphasize his
weak chin and forehead. This gesturing “thus,” as well as the accompanying image is
edited out of the published Notes, but later in the same passage, Sophia approximates
some of the imagistic properties of her original text. Considering the relation between
three sculptures, Sophia writes in the manuscript that Lepidus “stands opposite the
powerful Marc Antony—in the transept of the Braccio Nuovo—in the Vatican, and
Augustus in the center of the curve—the triumvirate—There they are—perfectly lifelike.”
Between the final “are” and “perfectly” is a gap of about two inches lengthwise, in which
Sophia has drawn a semi-circle with“Lepidus” penned in on the left end, “M.A.” on the
right, and “Augustus” in the apex. This layout figures in the print publication with a
careful spacing of text (276). !
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voided of their obvious personal apparatus, much as “faithful” visual copies channel the
works that they emulate at the expense of individualist expression. But Sophia’s writing
also aspires to something like the “Creation” that she saw in her Allston copy, a personal
intervention that distinguishes the copy from its source. For Sophia, this intervention lies,
somewhat ironically, in the very familial details that she explicitly voids from her larger
textual descriptions.
The tie between the most successful visual copies in Notes and in Sophia’s
writing is fruitful for considering the larger ambitions of the travelogue. If the best copies
can be “far finer in effect than the original picture,” it is by making some slight
moderation to their source. Looking at the alterations of Sophia’s text, both her
deviations from a ‘straight’ ekphrastic description and the changes she made from
manuscript to print volume provide a sense of the means to her own originality. Such an
examination reveals the extent to which the private life of Notes seeps into its ekphrastic
passages, and Sophia’s adept manipulation and incorporation of family life—a life that
the Hawthornes had explicitly sought to curtail from the public eye— into the space of
her ekphrastic description. By highlighting with ellipses and other markers her decisions
about what to excise or alter in the published volume, she signals her acute awareness of
both the public/private and original/copy divides. Notes is a record of the “works of the
Great Masters” for the general public, but it is equally a record of family life couched and
made consumable for a larger audience, a “record for my children’s sake, hereafter,” as
Sophia confesses near the end of the travelogue (346-7). Ekphrasis is for Sophia a means
of confronting both public and private spaces, copied and original works, and staking out
a place for herself as a writer and artist that is inclusive of both ends of this spectrum. By
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inhabiting through Notes an aesthetic middle ground, Sophia directly challenges the
notion that aesthetic questions must be phrased in these divisive terms. The figure in
Notes who first highlights this attempt to exist between categories is defined by some of
the same contradictions as Sophia’s text. A family friend who was also a prominent
public figure, and a proponent for Sophia’s creative work who also had strongly gendered
opinions about artistic originality, Ralph Waldo Emerson is key to introducing the terms
of analysis for Sophia’s ekphrasis.
Mr. E’s “Reflective” Muse
Ralph Waldo Emerson appears in four thematically significant passages in Notes,
the only person not actively participating in the travels to receive such attention. The
reiterated references to “Mr. E.” or “E.” as he is referred to in the published text,
emphasize his personal significance for Sophia, while his public persona renders these
references legible to Sophia’s readers. The references work actively to develop an
understanding of copying and originality, terms that were both subtexts to Sophia and
Emerson’s relationship and touchstones in his writing. As a recurrent figure in Notes,
Emerson helps to define the “singular” potential of the copy in Sophia’s own text.
Emerson first entered the Peabody family circle in 1822, when the recent college
graduate gave Greek lessons to Elizabeth, who was then teaching in Boston (Marshall
125-26). Elizabeth’s relationship to Emerson is well-documented. After the first awkward
introduction as pupil, she became close to Emerson and his second wife Lydian through
her work with Bronson Alcott’s school in the mid-1830s (Letters I: 449). Emerson
eventually considered her his equal in Greek as well as an important intellectual ally, and
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she was a frequent summer visitor to the Emersons’ home in Concord. On such visits she
helped to organize his lectures and advised him on publishing, a world with which she
had greater familiarity (Marshall 334-35). At her short-lived bookstore in Boston, she
hosted the final meeting of the Transcendental Club, and distributed and eventually
published copies of The Dial (Marshall 396; 425-27). While the aims of Elizabeth’s work
were more social and reformist than Emerson’s—she saw in his championing of the
individual the threat of “egotheism” among the “weak brother and sister
Transcendentalist[s]”— they were cut from the same intellectual cloth and held a deep
mutual respect for each others’ ideals (Gura 216).
Sophia’s relationship to Emerson is less well-documented, but was much more
than merely an extension of her older sister’s friendship. She maintained an independent
correspondence with Emerson into her late life and was his neighbor in Concord on two
separate occasions: in 1842, when Emerson rented the Old Manse to the newlywed
Hawthornes, and from 1860 until Nathaniel’s death in 1864, when the family returned
from Europe and lived in the Wayside (Marshall 428; Wineapple 333-37). Though
Emerson was conservative in his views of female artists, writing that creative genius
“dangerously narrows the career of a woman” and that “[o]nly the most extraordinary
genius can make the career of an artist secure and agreeable to her” he was adamantly
supportive of Sophia’s endeavors, including her attempts to move into crafting original
compositions (Marshall 211). He admired her skill at copying, writing for instance of a
copy of the Washington Allston painting Lorenzo and Jessica that it was “admirable, and
of a Chinese exactness of imitation,” but he encouraged her even more in creating
independent compositions (544). In 1836 he wrote, “I learn with great pleasure that you
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are attempting an original picture on a great subject. Of this I hope soon to hear much
more. I shall heartily rejoice in your success. You must postpone everything to it, but
your health”(1 Dec 1836). Two years later, he reiterated the encouragement: “I can never
quarrel with your state of mind concerning original attempts in your own art. I admire it
rather”(20 Jan 1838). Sophia sent drawings to him in the 30s, and in 1840 sculpted a
Roman-style portrait medallion of Emerson’s beloved brother Charles, who had died a
few years earlier. Emerson was deeply impressed by the “striking likeness” which Sophia
had produced from memory, and had eight copies in plaster cast for family members
calling it in a letter to Sophia “the gift of a Muse” and praising her “genius”(18 May
1840; Marshall 408).
It is not surprising that Emerson’s consideration of Sophia’s work centered on the
idea of copy and original; Emerson’s own literary reception often pivoted on these same
terms. A scathing 1847 review of Emerson’s Poems in the Southern Quarterly Review
begins by calling him “an American Carlyle, in the same way that we have the American
Walter Scott in Cooper, and the American Dickens in Neal… It is a grave mistake,
however, to take pride in such resemblances, as if any portion of the merit of the
originator of any style of writing, belonged to his copyists. What in him may be proof of
genius, in them is sure proof of the lack of it. (“Poems” 493) Other readers came to
nearly opposed perspectives. The same month that The Southern Review article appeared,
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published an admiring article on Emerson that takes a
very different perspective on the philosopher’s relation to originality. The Blackwood’s
article was a significant coup for Emerson, and was cited in several articles and reviews
of his work in the years after its publication. (As even an irreverent critic in the Southern
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Literary Messenger acknowledged five years later: “Mr. Emerson has attained to the
honour of a laudatory review in Blackwood’s Magazine, an honour to which very few
American writers have attained”[“History” 247]). The author here praises Emerson
precisely in terms of originality, stating that if he were called to elect an American writer
whose works “displayed the undoubted marks of original genius” he would select
Emerson; the author is “quite sure that no French or German critic could read the
speculations of Emerson without tracing in them the spirit of the nation to which this
writer belongs”(“Emerson” 644). This assessment, read alongside the contemporary
assessment of Emerson as a “copyist” of Carlyle speaks to the complexities of a writer
who both wears his transatlantic debts on his sleeve and proclaims that Americans “have
listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe”(68). Long before the publication of
“Quotation and Originality” in 1859, “an essay which made an eloquent and lengthy case
for the acknowledgement—even the acclamation—of cultural unoriginality,” Emerson’s
perspective on artistic originality caused controversy—or at least confusion (Macfarlane
11).
Sophia’s references to Emerson in Notes center on the writer’s seemingly
contradictory views, as well as her own conflicted considerations of artistic originality.
The allusions provide Sophia with an intellectual backdrop to considering the nature of
the copy and the potential power of ‘copied’ descriptions in her own text. At the same
time, the point is just as much in Emerson’s presence as it is in his perspective. The
power of Sophia’s own aesthetic copies lies precisely in the personal references to wellknown figures that Sophia works, almost imperceptibly, into the larger text. Emerson,
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and Sophia’s personal access to Emerson, is part of the currency that grants Notes its
value as ‘original.’
Sophia’s first reference to “Mr. E.” in Notes alludes clearly to his published
writings in order to discuss the the distinction between copies and the originals on which
they are based. By equating the copy with “Mr. E’s” (somewhat caricatured) reputation
as an isolationist, Sophia aligns travel, and implicitly her own travel writing, with
originality. Following a description of Raphael’s Staffa Madonna, Sophia contrasts the
original to Cephas Thompson’s well-respected copy, which she had recently seen in
Rome:
Mr. Thompson’s copy is good, but what can be said of Raphael’s creation? How
could wise and great Mr. E say such a preposterous thing as it was just as well not
to travel as to travel! And that each man has Europe in him, or something to that
effect? No, indeed; it would be better is every man could look upon these wonders
of genius, and grow thereby. Besides, after Mr. E had been to Europe himself,
how could he tell? Would he willingly have foregone all he saw in Italy? It was
mere transcendental nonsense—such a remark.”58
Moving seamlessly from a discussion of the painting and its copies into a discussion of
the gains of travel, Sophia clearly equates travel and the experience of originals. Emerson,
as a strawman in this passage, allows her to affirm her own (and her text’s) dedication to
the original work. At the same time, Emerson appears from the first as a figure of both
public and private significance. The reference to Emerson’s famous statement in “SelfReliance” that “[t]he soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home” could leave readers
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Notes 326. The text in the manuscript journal is even slightly more severe:
“How could wise and great Mr. Emerson ever say such a stupid thing as that it was just as
well not to travel as to travel, and that each man has Europe in him, or something to that
effect? Oh no—it would be better if every man could look upon these wonders of genius,
and grow thereby. Besides, after Mr. Emerson had been to Europe himself, and seen
every thing, how could he tell? Would he willingly have foregone all he saw in Italy? It
was a mere transcendental speech, I fancy” (Journal Vol. 2).
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with few doubts about the identity of the subject (186). But the irreverent tone and even
the seemingly stiff title—“Mr. Emerson” was the name by which Emerson’s wife Lydian
addressed him—affirm Sophia’s familial intimacy. “Mr. E.” is simultaneously a public
and private currency, just as Sophia’s descriptive writing here is aligned both with the
copy and with originality.
Later, Emerson figures as an owner of copies and a participant in Sophia’s own
descriptive copying. Both of these references allow Sophia to showcase her own distance
from the merely reiterative copy and to locate the source of her ekphrastic originality.
Sophia notes after describing a bad copy of Michelangelo’s Three Fates that “Mr. E. has
a copy, but I cannot recall it vividly enough to compare it to Michaelangelo’s”(369).
Though the statement seems a restraint of judgment, it is, in the context of Hawthorne’s
larger discussion of art, quite the opposite, as original works of art are often remarkable
precisely for the impression that they leave in their absence.59 Once again, Emerson is
pitted with the copy in order to imply the larger ambitions of Sophia’s own text. These
ambitions become clearer in the next reference to this figure. In describing a self-portrait
of Raphael, Sophia writes that he had “cheek and chin ‘clean as Apollo’s’ (as Mr.E. said
of his brother Charles’s)”(390). Here as in the last statement, the emphasis is on Sophia’s
private access to a figure whose public persona has already been established in the first
reference. Her familiarity with Emerson’s possessions and personal statements grants
Sophia’s readers a sense of sharing in this access, a sense that ultimately helps to build
the “singular” contribution of Sophia’s own document in the market of travelogues. In
this last reference, by building a Emerson’s personal quote into one of her own ekphrastic
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As she writes of Michaelangelo’s “faithful portrait bust”: “I know his face now
perfectly well”(403). !
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descriptions, she emphasizes that the artistic descriptions owe their originality to this
same access.
Emerson, then, represents this duality: he is a writer who both espouses imitation,
and is hailed as the first truly American voice of the nineteenth century. He claims a task
similar to Sophia’s own endeavor in Notes, to harness imitation as a conduit toward
originality. While the first three references stake out Sophia’s claims about originality
and imitation against Emerson’s own, the final passage uses Emerson’s ideas about the
reiterative nature of history as the foundation for a creative view of copying. This final
scene—ambiguous, imaginative, and dense with wordplay—reads in striking contrast to
the first three more candid references. And in a very literal sense, the passage is not about
Emerson at all: the manuscript journals reveal that this “E.,” unlike the others, refers to
Sophia’s sister Elizabeth. But the passage is markedly Emersonian, referring allusively
to the writer’s work to establish the creative potential of copying. The setting is the
historical battlefield on Lake Thrasimene, in which the Hannibal’s Cathaginian army
defeated the Roman forces during the Second Punic War. The landscape, in Sophia’s
description, has been transformed through time to a peaceful, hilly setting that still carries
resonances of the massacre:
We were served with a generous dinner, of which the poetical part was of course
fish from the classic lake, which we ate reflectingly. I felt as if I were a person in
an ancient history of Rome. Hannibal’s elephants were close at hand. The tent of
Flaminius was pitched near by—alas for him! Memories of war, defeat conquest,
alternated with the deep peace of the present moment, with the vines and olives
and fig-trees, the flocks and herds—the undisturbed grain waving, the birds
singing roundelays, the smooth waves lapsing to drown the distant tumult of war;
so real and profound the peace, so more and more ghostly and vanishing the battle.
While I dreamed over the purple twilight, the moon rose opposite our windows.
First a heap of clouds took fiery hues, like the reflection of a burning city, though
rather more pink than red; and then the gold rim of the moon marked a clear arc
of a circle over the mountain. When it rose a little higher, a column of silver
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struck down from its full orb into the depths of the lake, and soon the whole
atmosphere was flooded with white radiance. A still vaster peace rose with the
moon to possess the earth. I will write to E. as the muse of history, before I sleep.
(331-332).
This passage, which marks the abrupt end to the entry titled “Lake Thrasymene” in Notes,
is remarkable for its use of visual reflection as a metaphor for the intermixing of the past
and the present. From the first sentence, when the family eats a fish that has been brought
up to land “from the classic lake,” the levels of experience—water and land, past and
present—begin to intermix. Hawthorne’s pun on “reflectingly” prompts the next
statement: “I felt as if I were a person in an ancient history of Rome.” The landscape’s
memories of war, and the present state of peace, are given the backdrop of another
reflection, that of the rising moon “into the depths of the lake.” The “white radiance”
makes its stamp on the sky, the lake, the mountain. And then Hawthorne’s cryptic last
sentence: “I will write to E. as the muse of history, before I sleep.” Though the
manuscripts reveal Sophia’s sister as the source for this initial, the ambiguous “E.” of the
publication seems to reflect both Emerson and Elizabeth, a doubling that is in line with
the rest of the passage. The muse of history, as she appears in Emerson’s “History,”
would be at home in this fusion of past and present; what she recalls, and what
Hawthorne seems to be alluding to here, is Emerson’s idea that “The creation of a
thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie
folded already in the first man”(105). At the same time, the passage seems appropriately
addressed to Elizabeth, who was not only Sophia’s primary correspondent but had also
been the guiding force in Sophia’s early education, Punic Wars and all.60
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See for instance Marshall 128-129; 135 for Elizabeth’s encouragement of
Sophia’s Classical education. That the muse of history’s name, Clio, stems from the
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Though this passage does not directly address issues of artistic originality, these
ideas are nonetheless caught up in the language of text and its associations. If the family
eats “reflectingly,” they are also as reflections of people “in an ancient history of Rome.”
The copy that they create is far from perfect, mingling present with past rather than
simply preserving the latter. The tent of Flaminius is “pitched near by,” but rather than
dwell on this image, Sophia shifts to a hybrid mental space and the sense that “Memories
of war, defeat conquest, alternated with the deep peace of the present moment.” Neither
past nor present are unaffected one by the other; the bright hues of the sunset are “like the
reflection of a burning city,” but Sophia concedes they are “rather more pink than red.”
This is a moment “like” the past, but never quite identical to it, a copy that ends up
producing difference in the culminating “still vaster peace” that replaces the original war.
The allusion to Emerson’s “History” works to strengthen this connection between history
and artistic originality. Though the essay’s foundation lies in stressing the importance of
past events to the present moment, it culminates in the assertion that “Genius borrows
nobly,” and that “originality” can only exist in the interpretation and reformulation of
past thought. Sophia’s layered perspective of the battlefield enacts precisely this
reformulation.
A subtle alteration from the manuscript journal to the published text also confirms
the imagistic emphasis of this section. In Notes, the final line expresses Sophia’s aim to
write her letter “before I sleep,” but in the manuscript, this last line reads, “before I retire
from this marvelously beautiful picture”(Journal Vol. 2). This initial wording—
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Greek verb “to broadcast” or “to make famous” adds another dimension to this sisterly
reference. Elizabeth’s tireless promotion of other artists’ work made many careers,
including Nathaniel’s. To send a letter to Elizabeth, Sophia knew from her experience
with the “Cuba Journal,” was a form of pre-publication.
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clunkiness aside— affirms Sophia’s consideration of the landscape in painterly terms,
and reframes her extended description as ekphrasis. Like the rest of Sophia’s ekphrastic
passages, this is one in which Sophia’s own family—Una sketching, Julian gathering
shells, Rose picking flowers—is implicated.
Sophia’s Familial Ekphrasis
After Nathaniel’s death, publisher James Fields encouraged Sophia to write her
husband’s biography. Sophia’s response reveals her perception of the family’s relation to
the public: “I can neither write a book, nor would I, if able, so entirely set in opposition to
my husband’s express wish and opinion as to do so…The veil he drew around him no one
should lift”(Ordinary Mysteries 317). She went on to edit and publish his notebooks,
specifically, she wrote in the 1870 preface to Passages from the English Note-books, to
assuage such demands from the public (vii). But her formulation of Nathaniel as veiled—
a formulation that she used on several other occasions— is telling.61 Nathaniel is, like his
own characters Priscilla or the Reverend Hooper, both in the public eye and apart from it.
In Notes Sophia again picks up on the trope of the veil, and we find the biography of the
Hawthorne family that she resisted crafting outright. In Sophia’s hands, the “churches,
statues, and pictures” that Catherine Sedgwick in 1841 had termed as “familiar,” become
etymologically so, reflecting family in ways that transform mimesis into original
description. The aestheticized family descriptions that result are a manner of exploring
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61
For instance, in writing to Annie Fields’ on Nathaniel’s death in May 1864: “In
the most retired privacy it was the same as in the presence of men. The sacred veil of his
eyelids he scarcely lifted to himself. Such an unviolated sanctuary as was his nature, I his
inmost wife never conceived nor knew”(“Editing Hawthorne’s Notebooks” 299).
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the veil rather than purporting to lift it, all the while creating a work that everywhere
betrays the marks of its ‘originality.’
In the Sophia Hawthorne Papers in the Berg collection, a small pocket diary from
1859 presents the record of daily events from January, when the Hawthornes were in
Rome, to the next fall, by which time they had traveled back to London. The commercial
planner, its dates and holidays printed in French, allows only half of a small
(approximately 5 by 3 inch) page for each day’s entry. Within these curtailed rectangles,
Sophia records in terse prose the prosaic familial occurrences of each date. As such, the
diary functions as a parallel universe to the published Notes, which expostulates
expansively on artworks, people and places seen, but often neglects to mention how
exactly these spaces are traversed, and in the company of whom. The diary’s brief
records—written in tiny script, frequently up to the border allocated to each date—
provide immediate insight into the day-to-day concerns of a mother, in opposition to the
more high-flown preoccupations of the artist in Notes. Entries are numbingly similar,
typically comprising a line or two about the weather, some note about each family
member’s health, and a brief line about the social and cultural events in which the family
participated. A representative entry from the 26th of January demonstrates the dominance
of personal and physical concerns to these daily accounts: “Splendid day. Una not well,
so that I wrote to Mrs. Story that she could not drive. But at two she wanted to walk, and
Papa took her to the Forum. Miss Shepard came from her chamber at noon. My shoulder
was very bad and my cough. I feel brisée. I read Frederic the Great” (Diary). The most
common accounts of bodily suffering center on herself and on Una, who during this year
recovered slowly from a violent bout of malaria, but Sophia also recounts the ills of the
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nurse Ada Shepard, and the youngest child, Rose. Weather and health are in a constantly
fluctuating and equally unpredictable balance, the results of which determine the daily
landscape of the family’s life.
None of this attention to daily mundanities appears in the published edition of
Notes. Nonetheless, this work goes to pains to signal its reliance on an earlier,
unpublished document, seeming to underline the distinction between private and public
revelations, original and copied works. But the inconsistency of Sophia’s editorial marks
implies that she is more invested in pointing out this distinction than in upholding it. For
instance, some excisions from the journals and letters on which Notes is based are
marked with ellipses or a series of asterisks in the published text, but many other excised
passages are not. An examination of the journals reveals that most of the differences
between the print and the manuscript texts —flagged or not— are minor, consisting most
often of extended descriptions of friends or family whose inclusion in the published
document Sophia likely saw as too personal (Journal Vol. 1-5). Sophia’s inconsistent
marking of these minor differences demonstrates not an ingrained respect for the line
between original and copy, but a desire to make this line visible. As she was editing
Nathaniel’s journals in 1866, Sophia wrote to James Fields that “what I cannot copy at all
is still sweeter than the rest. The stars in their courses do not cover such treasures in
Space—as do the dots I substitute for words sometimes”(“Editing Hawthorne’s
Notebooks” 308). The primary function of such “dots” in Notes is to signal the existence
of this “sweeter” space. At the same time, as Marta Werner and Nicholas Lawrence have
argued in the context of Nathaniel’s edited journals, these ellipses “point to aporias in the
text that are themselves figures for her understanding of the soul.” Ellipses, like veils,
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reveal an understanding of selfhood in which “the self, an occulted mystery, is readable
only through signs of absence”(“This is His” 15). Sophia’s editorial gestures, insofar as
they are guides to readers, are self-conscious markers of the terms—private/public,
original/copy— at stake in consuming the work.62
These terms are readily apparent in Sophia’s presentation of family. Hawthorne
family members populate the pages of Notes only fleetingly; they appear as single initials
(or in the case of Nathaniel as “Papa” or “Mr. H.”) making occasional commentary on
aesthetic objects, but for the most part following as silent companions on Sophia’s artistic
pilgrimages.63 Though each of the family members plays only a small supporting role in
the travelogue as a whole, they strain constantly in couched forms at the borders of the
text. Embedded references to Nathaniel are particularly prevalent. Some passages point
specifically to “papa’s” celebrity and the types of access that this celebrity grants the
family and by extension Sophia’s readership. In Lincolnshire, for instance, Nathaniel
gives an antique bookseller his card, after which this man insists on guiding the
Hawthornes through his formidable personal collection of relics and art objects that
includes several drawings by Raphael, Rembrandt and Cellini. The opening of this
private collection and the recognition of Nathaniel’s standing are entwined, as an
exchange between Sophia and the bookseller’s wife hints: “I asked Mrs.P whether she
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62
The published text’s occasional and inconsistent use of footnotes to correct or
add statements has a similar effect as ellipses in signaling the existence of an ‘original’
manuscript. See for instance Mary Schriber 111-112 for Sophia’s use of footnotes and
bracketing in Notes.
63
The focus, even in the original journals, on art objects, likely made the excision
of family circumstances in the published volume relatively simple. Other personal
writings were more difficult to adjust. In June 1869, for instance, Sophia reviewed her
“Cuba Journal” writings as possible candidates for publication but concluded that it
would not be possible: “There is so much about people in them” (Hall 141).!
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were as much interested as her husband in these [art objects], and she said she was not,
but preferred to read. And then she remarked, pointing to a brilliant red-bird in a missal
that I was turning over: ‘That bird is almost as red as the Scarlet Letter!’ She said this in a
private, confidential little way, and made no other allusion to the authorship”(61). While
Sophia’s text never openly broadcasts its privileged space, it doesn’t need to; her
allusions in a “private confidential little way” are, like those of the bookseller’s wife,
more than clear enough. These allusions complicate the idea that the travelogue is a
purely public document of generally accessible spaces, and in highlighting these private
collections, makes its own claims for what it can provide of “original” content for its
readers. At the same time, the use of visual cues in this passage provides an analogy for
Sophia’s own transformative ekphrasis. Just as the bookseller’s wife gestures from the
“brilliant red-bird,” to the “Scarlett Letter,” to its author, Sophia uses the visual
description of Notes to point toward family, enmeshing her own familial “originals” into
the space of the ekphrastic copy.
Sophia’s descriptions of Nathaniel are similarly invested in remaining at the level
of the object, if not explicitly the art object. Nathaniel is rarely given voice in the course
of Notes, but his appearance is often the subject of commentary. In one passage
describing diners at a Scottish boarding house, Sophia compare their aesthetic merits
much as she might compare a series of adjacent paintings: “The table was exactly full,
and I saw hardly one comely person. Two young gentlemen in gray, and a young
clergyman at the top of the table, were good-looking, but only one individual in the room
was eminently handsome”(185). This “one individual” is almost certainly Nathaniel, to
whom Sophia turns next in conversation. The passing reference seems almost gratuitous,
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but serves to rally readers together around the famous—and famously beautiful—figure
who likely inspired much of the text’s readership, at the same time as it establishes a
knowing connection between Sophia and these same readers. At the same time
Nathaniel’s representation as alternately “handsome,” or on another occasion “an Artist
of the Beautiful” readies the ground for the even more explicit aesthetization of other
family members (185; 337).
The Hawthorne children, like Nathaniel, appear much more predominately in the
manuscript journals than in the publicized text. In many cases, this presence takes the
form simply of a specification of appearance, as in this entry from March 25, 1858
describing the family’s visit to the Villa Ludoviso in Rome: “Upon entering the gate,
avenues and enchanting vistas opened on every side, but we went first to the Casino of
Sculpture. [We were six— my husband, Una, Miss Shepherd, Julian, and Bud]”(Journal
Vol. 1). Sophia’s brackets mark the text that is edited from the published document.
Because of such excisions, the plural first-person pronoun that remains in the first line of
the text echoes vaguely throughout Notes, a general ‘we’ that rarely specifies its precise
participants. The children take much more specified form in the original manuscripts. In
the first Roman manuscript journal, a full-page pencil drawing of a young girl in a kneelength dress figures on the cover page of the book, subtitled “Rose in Rome/ Palazzo
Lazarani/ Percean Hill.” On the other side of the page, the faint outline of a pencil
drawing of a young boy, perhaps Julian, remains, the vestiges of a concerted erasure (Vol.
1). Another entry is interrupted by the name “Rose,” written in a slightly unsteady and
juvenile hand. Sophia’s parenthetic comment follows: “(Mademoiselle Bouton de Rose
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just requested to insert her name, and here it is for all who are interested in her little
autograph)” (Journal 5:67).
These remnants of family life are effaced from Notes, replaced by artworks that
betray some tangential evidence of the children’s lives. The recurrent descriptions of
Madonna and Child that populate Notes can be seen as reflections on Sophia’s own
maternity, but such works also betray more specific descriptions of individual family
members.64 Sophia’s children are, in fact, only described in relation to the aesthetic
objects that the travelogue takes as its central focus. For instance, we have a general
outline of Julian’s size from his fitting of an antique vest: “Lord Burleigh must have been
slender, for J could not button it round his waist”(58). Una similarly is described in
relation to painting. On a visit to the gallery of the Sciarra Palace, Sophia describes
Titian’s Bella Donna in terms that work to image Una: “A folded mass of auburn hair
crowns the head, and falls behind the throat. As U. stood near I perceived what artists
have meant when they called U.'s hair ‘ Titian hair,’ for it was precisely like the Bella
Donna's”(263). Una resembles the painting, rather than vice versa. The primacy of
ekphrasis is clear: when Sophia goes on with her description after the reference to Una
(“The eyes are dark and rather small, and their expression and that of the perfect mouth
are not amiable”) we assume that she has moved back to a discussion of the Titian
painting, though the subject is never specified. Moments such as this allow for Sophia’s
“originality,” enabling her to revel in both the artwork and her own creation.
Rose is similarly aestheticized. In the published text, she appears only as “R.,” but
in the manuscripts, her name is the subject of Sophia’s concentrated maternal whimsy:
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See for instance Schriber 108; Hall 144 for reflections of Sophia’s maternity.
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she is alternately Rose, Rosebud, Bud, Baby, and Bouton de Rose. The variations on
“rosebud” suggest that she was the inspiration for Sophia’s representation of her children
as rose “portraits” when describing a meadow scene in England: “We gathered here from
a wild eglantine three roses—one a shut-bud, but showing the lovely pink petals—
another not quite half opened, and a third just ready to unfold, but curved over the
stamens. We named them after three children we know, and they are the prettiest of
portraits”(184). This nickname also recalls Sophia’s extended description of Guido’s
Beatrice Cenci portrait, particularly its fixation on the “rose-bud lips, sweet and tender,”
that betray “no cry, nor power to utter a word”(213). The silence of the painted innocent
neatly echoes the speechless artistry of Sophia’s own children: described only through
works of art, their speech is curtailed in the text to the snippets of childish commentary
on the works that are at the center of Sophia’s travelogue.
These transformations demonstrate the extent to which ekphrasis for Sophia
moves beyond rote description and into “familiar things.” Ekphrasis is not merely the
reiteration of well-worn territory, as Catherine Sedgwick implies, but the creative
transformation of the public art object into a space that likewise can function as a private
family record in the “hereafter”(347). Through these moments of transformation, it
becomes apparent that Notes’ preoccupation with copy and original is tied up precisely in
the creative power of ekphrasis. The domestic backdrop of Notes’s ekphrastic moments
forms the subtext for thinking about how the textual and visual copy in Sophia’s
travelogue can take on the characteristics of originality. The use of ekphrasis as a means
of covering the presence of family also seems an acknowledgement of Sophia’s earlier
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injunction to James Fields that the “veil” not be lifted from Nathaniel. This insistence is,
in other words, both a creative and a protective act.
Conclusion
In a section from the Roman journals, Sophia comments that “over every rare and
famous masterpiece in the churches these Romans hang a veil, so as to get a paul for
removing it; though I should like to think it were to preserve the painting from dust and
light, which might fade the colors”(203). Sophia presents two possible understandings of
the veil here: the one (cynical) view that it exists only to bring profit to those who have
placed it there, the other (more hopeful) possibility that it is placed to protect from the
damage of exposure. (She does add, in relation to the Domenichino fresco in question,
that the priest who unveils it “seemed neither to expect or await a fee— honor be to him
ever!”).
Her own travelogue could be read according to these same terms of exploitation
and protection. In some senses, Notes shows Sophia both keeping the veil intact and
getting a paul for removing it. The popularity of her travelogue depended heavily on its
thinly veiled familial subtext, but its publication did little to offer any novel revelation.
The barrier that Sophia cast over her private space, then, acted to compel a readership and
to protect the members of an inner circle. Here again, Sophia manages to have it both
ways. The most significant aspect of this binary, though is not her text’s tenuous
existence in the space between exploitation and protection, but the role that she as an
author has in creating this space. In the passage describing the Domenichino fresco,
Sophia summons the unveiling priest by “pulling at the curtain” herself (203). While
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Notes continuously insists on its author’s inability to unveil the people, places and objects
of her Roman encounters, this tugging at the edges suggests an awareness of her role in
initiating revelation. Unlike Nathaniel’s passively unveiled Priscilla, Sophia is the agent,
however hesitant, of the act of unveiling.
The difference that Sophia’s perspective makes for conceptions of her own
writing and women’s writing more generally is subtle but important. Sophia saw her own
undertaking as both derivative and potentially original, both copy and singular, both
public and private. This undefined place in the literary landscape could be—and
continues to be— troubling. One contemporary review of the travelogue praises Sophia
for covering “with originality”(295) many of the topics that Nathaniel himself had
documented, but is clearly uncomfortable with the execution of this innovation in
Sophia’s descriptions of art, taking to task the “poetical” embroidery surrounding
Guido’s Beatrice Cenci: “To see in the Cenci’s ‘white, smooth brow, without cloud or
furrow of pain,’ the hovering of ‘a wild, endless despair,’ is to much more than is
evidently visible on the canvas, or than is certainly apparent in the description”(295).
Sophia’s ekphrasis moves out of the bounds of the literal description that a reader
anticipates from a travel narrative, into the more nebulous realm of the “poetical.” Notes,
which relies on strict dichotomies at the same time that it thrives in the spaces between
them, invites such confusion. But so too does ekphrasis more generally, which exists by
its very nature in the undefined middle ground between the perfect copy and the
freestanding work, never entirely able to attain either extreme. Ekphrasis is, in this sense,
the ideal medium for an ambivalent author. That it should be such a popular one at
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precisely the time when publication summoned ever more ordinary civilians—many of
them women travelers—is no coincidence.
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Chapter Three
Longfellow, Michael Angelo, and the “Middle-Class” Curator
Longfellow is artificial and imitative. He borrows incessantly, and mixes
what he borrows, so that it does not appear to the best advantage. He is
very faulty in using broken or mixed metaphors. The ethical part of his
writing has a hollow, secondhand sound. He has, however, elegance, a
love of the beautiful, and a fancy for what is large and manly, if not a full
sympathy with it.
– Margaret Fuller, “American Literature: Its Position in the Present
Time, and Prospects for the Future” (1846).
Introduction
Fuller’s short analysis of Longfellow in the epigraph above is striking for its
ability to define the terms that dominate both contemporary and modern criticism of the
poet. Her judgment of Longfellow as “artificial and imitative” resounds with Whitman’s
categorization of the poet as an “adopter and adapter”(Traubel 549). Poe, in the reviews
that make up his half of the infamously overblown “Longfellow War”65 takes the idea of
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The “Longfellow War” or “little war,” was a controversy that raged in periodicals in 1845, initiated
by Poe’s January review of Longfellow’s The Waif in the Evening Mirror, which implied plagiarism
in its detection of a “moral taint” in the volume. Responses by Longfellow, Poe and others followed on
both sides of the plagiarism question through a number of different periodicals. Some allege that the
media storm was constructed by Poe, then the editor at Graham’s Magazine, for the sole cause of
increasing magazine sales. The “war” continues to be at the center of critical interest in Longfellow
with critics including Virginia Jackson, Kent Ljunquist, Meredith McGill, Edward Piacentino, and
Burton Pollin weighing in on the issue. This interest—going well beyond the exchanges status as
literary scandal—reflects the “war’s” broader relevance to issues such as the perception of plagiarism
in print culture, and historical and contemporary lyric reading. Virginia Jackson argues, for instance,
that the exchange might be read “not only as a negotiation of the terms of Poe’s own authorship, but
also as an apprehension of the future of lyric reading,” with Longfellow as a stand-in for the academic
modes of poetic classification that govern much of contemporary reading practices (“Poe, Longfellow”
24).
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aesthetic imitation one step further, accusing the poet of “the most barbarous class of
literary robbery”(“Voices of the Night” 103). Fuller’s judgment of Longfellow’s
problematic “mixing” (both in his blending of sources and his incongruous metaphors)
also resonates with Poe’s assessment that Longfellow’s use of imagery “wavers
disagreeably between two ideas which would have been merged by the skillful artist in
one”(101). Recurring incongruities such as these are the source for Poe’s resounding
judgment that “[Longfellow] has no combining or binding force. He has absolutely
nothing of unity”(100). Fuller’s backhanded blow to Longfellow’s “manliness,” and the
faint praise of “elegance” meanwhile, echoes Whitman’s understanding of the writer as
the “universal poet of women and young people.” and Poe’s encapsulation of his reading
public as “negrophilic old ladies of the north”(“Specimen Days” 194; Essays and
Reviews 762).
Of course, these are among the harshest assessments of Longfellow’s
contemporary readers, but the basic focal points of their critique—imitation, disunity, and
femininity—echo through even more favorable modern Longfellow criticism. The
Longfellow Wars and the question of the poet’s influences occupy critics as diverse as
Virginia Jackson, Christoph Irmscher, and Mary Louise Kete. That the pendulum has
swung to a different understanding of the value of “imitation” is evidenced by Jackson’s
elucidation of Longfellow’s literary sources, Irmscher’s re-evaluation of Longfellow’s
sense of his own “originality” and Kete’s framing of Longfellow as a “sentimental
collaborator.” “Unity,” meanwhile, a term that has largely fallen out of the vocabulary of
post-New Critical readers, lives on as a useful term in critical reactions to Longfellow’s
“broken” canon. In the introduction to the 1988 Penguin edition of Longfellow’s Selected
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Poems, for instance, Lawrence Buell’s observation that the “would-be masterwork”
Christus shows “unevenness and disunity” is uncontroversial (xxv). Similarly, Fuller’s
jab at Longfellow’s masculinity has an afterlife in the work of Irmscher and Eric
Haralson, who see Longfellow less as a writer lacking in manly “force” than as, in
Haralson’s words, a progressive advocate of “a cross gendered sensibility” and a
“sentimental’ masculinity”(329).
Longfellow’s writing on visual art, particularly his posthumously published
dramatic poem, Michael Angelo: A Fragment (1883), provides a unique opportunity to
examine these terms as they interact within the body of the poet’s work itself. Within
Longfellow’s canon, the visual arts and material objects have long been considered as
metaphors for the poet’s understanding of his own literary work.66 Fittingly, readings of
Michael Angelo have focused on the work as biographical or anti-biographical, as either
“a spiritual autobiography”(“Mr. Longfellow and the Artists” 830) or “a study of
everything Longfellow was not”(Irmsher 142). Michelangelo is for Longfellow an
important figure of self-conscious artistic evaluation because the same terms that
circulate positively around that artist in the nineteenth century—masculinity, grandeur,
originality—circulate in their negative form around Longfellow, carrying insinuations of
femininity, brokenness, and derivation. The biographical readings of the play all seem to
latch onto this truth: that Michelangelo becomes a proving ground for Longfellow, a
means of sorting out and analyzing these terms late in his career. But as I argue, this
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66
One writer went so far, shortly after Longfellow’s death, as to consider an
influence in artistic matters one of Longfellow’s central contributions: “It is not too
much to say that he was the most potent individual force for culture in America, and the
rapid spread of taste and enthusiasm for art which may be noted in the people near the
end of his long and honorable career may be referred more distinctly to his influence than
to that of any other American”(“Mr. Longfellow and the Artists” 826)
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organizing process does not work either to frame Longfellow’s canon with a
Michelangelesque grandeur, or to set in contrast their respective artistic modes.
Longfellow’s Michelangelo is, unlike the Michelangelo of many writers in the 18th and
19th centuries, not a figure of exclusions but of inclusions, embodying the contradictions
that circulate around the terms of gender, artistic unity and originality. As such,
Michelangelo may indeed provide a late-career perspective on Longfellow’s work, but it
is a view that complicates rather than simplifies.
Longfellow’s Michelangelo becomes, in the course of the play, a site where the
writer can theorize his own definition of artistry. This definition, though, falls far from
the textbook readings of either Michelangelo or Longfellow, which emphasize the
extremities of both artists: Longfellow as plagiarist, as populist, as sentimentalist;
Michelangelo as emblem of aesthetic originality, as genre-defining high artist, as crass
sensualist. These typical definitions are mirror images of one another, and in Michael
Angelo, Longfellow brings both extremes to the character of the Renaissance artist, who
gains nuance in the process. The aesthetic theory that emerges from the contradictions of
this protagonist controverts any easy distinction between high art and craft, and questions
the critical apparatus that presumes to draw such distinctions. This figure makes a virtue
of notions such as the fragmented, the unfinished, the derivative, and the transient. As
such, Longfellow’s Michelangelo is a patron-saint of what I call, following Fuller, the
“middle class.”
This “middle class” has an implicit connection to economic categories, but is
much more firmly grounded in an aesthetic midpoint. Margaret Fuller, in an 1845 review
of Poems, calls Longfellow “a middle class” poet, a label that was certainly not intended
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as complimentary, but rather aimed to reflect the poet’s middleground position between
the high-cultural elite and the disposable pulp writing of the lowbrow (152). This label
can also serve more neutrally to point out the borderlands that Longfellow occupies:
between masculine and feminine norms, between original invention and outright
plagiarism, between the genteel and the proto-modern. To see Longfellow as “middle
class” is both to understand his democratic appeal and to recognize the fragmentary,
underdefined and overdetermined nature of this state. In a telling comment, Fuller writes
in this same review that “Mr. Longfellow presents us not with a new product in which all
the old varieties are melted into a fresh form, but rather with a tastefully arranged
Museum, between whose glass cases are interspersed neatly potted rose trees, geraniums
and hyacinths”(158). This remark posits the poet’s writing as not fully cohesive, its
multiple parts not “melted” but “arranged” in the artificial environment of a greenhousemuseum. As such, the artistic result is not a new product whose independent components
are largely submerged for the greater good of the whole, but rather a space whose larger
external form is less significant than its distinct internal components. Longfellow here
lacks not just unity, but artistic originality, the force that allows borrowed elements to
take an entirely new form. At the same time, the concept of Longfellow as museumcurator opens up his literature for consideration through a nineteenth-century culture
newly driven by collecting and by the burgeoning space of the museum gallery.
This imagination of Longfellow’s museum drives my reading both of quasiekphrastic works like Michael Angelo and the poet’s larger canon. The story of the visual
arts in nineteenth-century America—and especially of the middle class’s experience of
the visual arts— cannot be told apart from the space of the museum. Early in the century,
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this museum consisted largely of the European galleries and exhibition spaces that upper
and upper-middle class travelers entered on the Grand Tour, and transmitted into text
through travelogues and letters home. After the first quarter of the nineteenth-century,
internationally-focused collections and galleries began to appear within the United States,
beginning with private collections, and then with university and gallery collections such
as the ones donated to Longfellow’s own alma mater, Bowdoin, in 1811 and 1826. But
both European and American collections, however ambitious in scope, had their
foundations in the eclectic home collections of images and artifacts popular for centuries
in sometimes extensive curiosity cabinets. These collections were by their very nature
incomplete and fragmentary, particularly in the early and indiscriminate period of
collecting that characterized the mid-nineteenth century. By 1870, pioneering American
collector James Jackson Jarves could still say “We cannot speak of art museums as a
matter of fact in America” qtd. in Coleman 90). At mid-century, collections were still
more in flux, often unsystematized spaces bringing together natural history artifacts,
informal performances, copies or casts of artworks, and original artistic “masterworks.”
In fact these galleries are, Lawrence Levine argues, emblematic of the permeability of
what we now consider as high or low cultural spaces. Museums of the era often had
unclearly-defined objectives, and only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did
“sacred language and religious analogies” enforce a certain hushed attitude toward art
spectatorship (Levine 149).
This idea of the nineteenth-century American museum as culturally
unsystematized provides a blueprint for complicating Margaret Fuller’s understanding of
Longfellow as “middle-class.” If, as Levine argues, early to mid-nineteenth century
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citizens “shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into
relatively rigid adjectival boxes than their descendants were to experience a century later,”
Fuller’s “middling” of Longfellow presents not a clear cultural category, but a loose
understanding of what he is not. To be a “middle-class” poet is to be other than the
creators of “mock poetry” who are solely “fed by their own will to be seen of
men”(Levine 9; Fuller 151, 152). It is likewise to be other than the poets of “the
Pantheon, from which issue the grand decrees of immortal thought”(151). What “middleclass” entails in positive terms is less clear from Fuller’s neither/nor definition of the
category. I suggest that we re-evaluate Fuller’s understanding of the class in relation to
the mid-century collection. Longfellow’s work is less “tastefully arranged museum” than
tastefully disordered, its diversity of influences suggesting that Longfellow does not hold
himself tensely between extremes of high and low, as Fuller suggests, but rather
participates in the far ends of both of these categorizations. Longfellow’s “middle-class”
is not a cultural vacuum, but a space of cultural excess, a space where commercialism
and disinterested aesthetics, craft and art, can overlap. This sense of the “middle-class” is
a means of understanding Longfellow that goes beyond a convenient critical category,
and becomes a means of discussing fragmentation in both the form and the content of his
work.
In this chapter, I first trace Longfellow’s habits of home collection, which
demonstrate his investment in the material object (whether of art or craft) and his
understanding of its function as a personal and historical marker. Next, I look to three
ekphrastic poems that puzzle out the boundaries between art and craft. The definition of
these terms that emerges from these poems ultimately leads into Michael Angelo, an
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ambitious work that resists the simplifying gestures of much earlier commentary on the
artist in favor of a complex portrayal of a figure characterized as part stonemason, part
divinely-ordained artist. Longfellow’s resistance to drawing boundaries – whether
between craftsmanship and artistry, femininity and masculinity, or imitation and
originality— is the factor that most clearly defines Michael Angelo. It is also this factor
that can allow us to reclaim Fuller’s assessment of Longfellow as “middle-class” in
constructive terms, not as an aesthetic purgatory, but as a conscious choice, a selfpositioning between aesthetic extremes. My readings of Longfellow’s representation of
the visual arts in Michael Angelo and other art-centered works considers how the
fragmentary nature of these metaphors can shape our understanding of Longfellow’s
ekphrastic canon, and of Longfellow’s canon as a whole.
Longfellow at Home
In this section, I look to Longfellow’s personal and domestic relation to the
collection of visual objects as evidence of an aesthetic driven by eclecticism and
association rather than strict classification. This aesthetic shapes my reading of his
ekphrastic work, which I see as self-consciously probing the categories of art and craft.
Longfellow’s biographical and literary relation to the visual arts and crafts is usually read
solely through the lens of one of three closely related ideas: a concern with materiality, an
interest in the history and tradition of the crafted object, and a connection to the
conspicuous consumption of nineteenth-century bourgeois “gewgaws.” While all of these
relations to the object are evident in Longfellow’s biography and work, his poetry
transforms these objects from markers of consumption to historical and sentimental sites,
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objects that call into play the specific contexts or emotions of their histories.
Longfellow’s encounters with the visual arts betray an interest in the aesthetic potential
of the eclectic collecting in which he himself participated. Such eclecticism calls into
question recent critical perspectives that locate Longfellow solely as a “competent
redistributor of cultural goods” in opposition to the role of “godlike creator of unique
meaning”(Irmscher 3). I argue that Longfellow’s domestic artworks and artifacts, as his
ekphrastic poems, show him approaching both of these extremes with equal proficiency.
The Age of the Museum in America had its roots not in international art tourism,
but in a national interest in traditional hand-crafted American objects such as ceramics.
At the end of the eighteenth century, local historical societies began to form with the goal
of collecting and preserving American antiquities including books, manuscripts and
household objects. At the fore in 1791 was the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS),
followed by the New York Historical Society in 1804. An institution of somewhat
broader reach but similar goals, the American Antiquarian Society formed in 1812. In the
course of the 1820s, more local societies followed in Maine, Rhode Island, New
Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Groups of serious individual collectors of
antiquities also grew in the first half of the century, especially in New England, where a
longer local history facilitated the discovery of collectibles. After the Civil War, a
number of societies including the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)
encouraged individuals in their collecting efforts. (Lockwood 64-67).
Longfellow’s work and life closely follows this interest in the handcrafted visual
object. A writer in The Atlantic Monthly shortly after his death suggested that the writer’s
poetry was responsible for the recent rise in “the graphic and constructive arts and music”
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because “his appropriating genius drew within the circle of his art a great variety of
illustration and suggestion from the other arts”(“Mr. Longfellow and the Artists” 826).
Historical perspective may have tempered this assertion: today, it seems clear that
Longfellow was a small part of a larger movement drawn to the “suggestion” of the
visual arts, broadly defined. By the time that he began attending Bowdoin College as an
undergraduate in 1822, the school had secured the first donations that made up its campus
museum, the first such collection in the nation (Coleman 10-15). Longfellow’s letters
home from his first visit to Europe, shortly after graduating from college, show frequent
mention of art and artists. After he had established himself as a writer, Longfellow was
actively involved in the illustration and visual layout of his works, offering suggestions
for images to the editors of his many illustrated volumes. His writing itself has often been
considered strikingly imagistic, and passages of his most famous works, including
Evangeline and Hiawatha, are inspired by paintings. Artistic appreciation and collection
formed an important part of Longfellow’s domestic life and lived on in his sons Charles,
whose collection of Japanese decorative arts contributed to the aesthetic of his parents’
home, and Ernest, a painter who illustrated a posthumously published edition of his
father’s collected poems.67
The art of Longfellow’s domestic life has itself been collected in a 2007 Maine
Historical Society exhibit, “Drawing Together: the Arts of the Longfellows,” which
presents the visual culture of three generations of the Longfellow family. These works
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67
For a detailed treatment of Charles Longfellow’s travel and collecting practices,
see Christine Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting and Japan (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2004). The “objects” that Longfellow collected included
ceramics, furnishings, photographs, and a full-back tattoo of an Asian carp. Prints were
made from twenty of Ernest’s paintings is Twenty Poems from Longfellow (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1884).
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showcase the values often associated with the poet’s canon as a whole: domesticity,
community, history, and craftsmanship. But the eclecticism of the exhibition also
indicates the permeability of aesthetic categories—and textual and imagistic
boundaries— within the Longfellows’ domestic space. The show includes work
encompassing embroidery samplers, oil portraits, architectural plans, children’s drawings,
adults’ drawings, sculptures and maps. Some of the works are collaborative, like
drawings initialed by both mother and daughter, or large drawings undertaken by both
Longfellow sons. Both the poet and his wife Fanny took drawing lessons with the
professional artist Francis Greater, who also illustrated Longfellow’s poem “The
Skeleton in Armor.” Ernest Longfellow, who would later become a professional painter,
produced childhood drawings that were submitted to serious scrutiny, as the poet-father
annotated each with date, subject matter and the graphic problem confronted (Korzenik
493-5). Other childhood art projects were inspired by well-known works, like the spooled
drawings that reproduced the aims of John Banvard’s panorama paintings of the
Mississippi River Valley. Banvard’s painting also influenced Longfellow’s own textual
work, inspiring descriptive passages in Evangeline (Irmscher 85). The intermingling of
text and image is likewise evident in the local subject matter of many of Longfellow’s
own carefully rendered drawings of the landscapes or houses in the environs of
Cambridge, which embody the dictum expressed at the end of his “Gaspar
Becerra”(1850): “O thou sculptor, painter, poet!/ Take this lesson to thy heart: / That is
best which lieth nearest; / Shape from that thy work of art.” (Korzenik 491-498; The
Seaside 70).
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The interaction of text and image is also sustained in many of the creative projects
that Longfellow undertook specifically for his children. Among the works in the poet’s
archives in the Houghton Library are the extensive illustrated stories that the poet wrote
for his children. These tales—humorous, densely illustrated, and often indirectly
didactic—reveal much about Longfellow’s family and the function that art played in this
part of his life. Longfellow’s illustrated stories for his children, such as the sagas “Little
Merrythought,” “Peter Piper,” and “Peter Quince” showcase the interaction of the visual
and verbal narrative. In “Little Merrythought,” the series’ protagonist is a tiny man
composed of a turkey’s wishbone, something between a pet and a companion for
Longfellow’s children, who appear in thinly veiled as characters. Longfellow at various
points considered editing the series, which he worked on from 1847 to 1855, for
publication, but it exists today only in manuscript-form. “Peter Quince” and “Peter Piper,”
likewise unpublished, center on the misadventures of well-meaning but slightly
buffoonish protagonists, often in the context of international travel, one of Longfellow’s
favorite literary subjects. (Irmscher 86-93; 143-155).
The decision not to publish ultimately places Longfellow’s illustrations in his
home collection of (largely original) art objects rather than in his (largely mass-produced)
literary bibliography. But categorizations such as reproduction and originality provide
little real guidance in thinking of the place of visuality in Longfellow’s life and work.
The diversity of his home collection, which features both original objects and
reproductions, has a strong parallel in the mid-century museum. Longfellow’s home in
Cambridge was known to both friends and strangers for its beautiful material objects, and
visitors in his lifetime were—as they still are— granted tours of the possessions. For
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some, such objects connoted solely material wealth. Emerson, for instance, wrote in his
journal in 1853 of his reluctance to visit Longfellow in his home: “Longfellow, we
cannot go & talk with; there is a palace, & servants, & a row of bottles of different
coloured wines & wine glasses, & fine coats”(447 Emerson in his Journals). The
“different coloured wines” in the Longfellow home were undoubtedly part of the statusconscious collection of mid-nineteenth century America, but such objects were also a
personal means of interacting with history. In Longfellow’s office, for instance, prized
objects included markers of both sentimental and commercial value: Thomas Moore’s
and Coleridge’s quill pens; fragments of Dante’s coffin; first editions of various works;
and crayon portraits of Emerson, Sumner and Hawthorne. Irmscher argues that these
objects formed not a high-cultural “shrine,” but were symbolic of Longfellow’s
understanding of literature, in which writing was “achieved in patient dialogue with those
who had come before”(44). These objects, far from being simply status symbols, stand as
personal and historical markers, connecting Longfellow to creators of the past and the
present, presiding over the scene of his writing much in the same way that intertextual
references and passages permeate the text of his writing. Contemporary photographs and
commentary from visitors indicate that the office-collection was less “tastefully arranged
Museum” than it was an often disordered space of influence and association in which
Longfellow’s children also played. (Irmsher 43-44).
The reading public came to associate Longfellow and his work with this varied
home collection—as did the poet himself. A sort of contemporary visual culture sprang
up around the home and its contents. In addition to the numerous photographs of the poet
in his study—often sitting almost incidentally off to one side, or dwarfed by the objects
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on the room—prints of the poet in his home were common, especially by the 1870s,
when the poet’s own immortalization as national treasure was complete.68 A nineteenpage profile of the writer in the November 1878 Scribner’s includes no fewer than twelve
large illustrations—all of them of a room in the house or its surroundings. Though the
article devotes only a few paragraphs to Longfellow’s historic home (which had briefly
been Washington’s headquarters), a connection between an artist’s work and his domestic
space introduces the profile and contextualizes these prints: “We find in all biographies
that all writers, even the greatest, are influenced by their surroundings” (“Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow” 1). Other articles note Longfellow’s “penchant for pipe
collecting,” architectural details of the building, and particular artworks in his collection.
An ekphrastic newspaper poem, “On a Portrait Owned by H.W. Longfellow and Painted
by Tintoretto,” celebrates the poet as sharing the sight of the painting with “lesser
mortals.” Longfellow was conscious enough of this documentation that he clipped many
of these articles and assembled them, alongside of hand-written entries on notable events
taking place in the home, in a scrapbook labeled “Craigie House.” He also carefully
archived the contents of his various home collections, keeping notebooks, for instance, of
both alphabetically-organized logs of the wines in the cellar and the paintings throughout
his home.69
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68
The Longfellow National Historic Site at the poet’s former home in Cambridge,
MA houses many of the original prints and negatives of these photographs, and keeps a
record and reproductions of images at other institutions.
69
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. I
have not been able to find the source for the article noting Longfellow’s “penchant for
pipe-collecting” or the ekphrastic poem; as many of the articles in the Craigie House
scrapbook, the title and date have been clipped off both. The author of the poem is noted
as James Berry Bensel; the Tintoretto portrait has been shown to be inauthentic. It is clear
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This eclecticism—a careful attention not just to paintings, but to pipes and
wines—is the dominant characteristic of the home collection. Longfellow’s own
participation in this wide spectrum of art-craft collecting, and his poetry’s participation in
the same variety, can get lost in reading Longfellow entirely against the grain of
originality. The appreciation of the imitative nature of Longfellow’s verse—which
Jackson aptly calls “so thoroughly derivative that it becomes authentic, so artful that it
becomes natural”— often makes an implicit argument for understanding Longfellow’s
production as craft (“Longfellow’s Tradition” 471). Longfellow’s “borrowings,” hidden
to the point of transparency, are an important source of the work’s widespread resonance
with mass audiences. If we choose to see Longfellow as “less as an ‘original’ creator than
as the competent redistributor of common cultural goods, whose relationship with his
audience was based on a system of exchange, both monetary and emotion,”(Irmscher 67)
then we are clearly aligning him with nineteenth-century conceptions of craft.70 So while
a positive emphasis on Longfellow’s derivations offers a constructive critical shift, to
argue that Longfellow conceived of his poetry exclusively in craftsman’s terms limits the
work’s broader spectrum.
This equation of Longfellow’s work with craft is problematized not only by the
more open attitude toward art-craft distinctions apparent in the poet’s home collection,
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that Longfellow read these newspaper articles carefully, as many include the poet’s
marginalia and corrections.
70
Longfellow’s business-savvy is well-documented. See for instance Irmscher 5358 or Charvat 106-167. The division of craft and art in the early nineteenth century
depended largely on whether or not one was dependent on such economic “systems of
exchange”: artisans were, artists were not. After the Civil War, the role of professional
(economically dependent) artist gained prestige only as it set itself in opposition to
working class “art labor”: fabric design, “ornamental terra-cotta brick, ceramics, stained
glass, and wrought iron”(Korzenik 497-499).
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but by the complications of his ekphrastic canon. The ekphrastic work offers a vision of
artistry that supplements the diligent workmanship of “craft” poems like “The Village
Blacksmith”(1842) whose protagonist “Each morning sees some task begin, / Each
evening sees it close.” There is more to Longfellow’s work—and to his artistic selfpresentation— than the redistribution of such “common cultural goods,” and his
ekphrastic canon shows earnest thought over categories such as craft and fine art,
emulation and originality. These poems are much less likely than others to be read
critically by either Longfellow’s contemporaries or modern critics. Of less obvious
nationalistic or historical import than sweeping narratives such as Hiawatha or
Evangeline, these poems –often short lyrics—are easy to dismiss as ornamental museum
pieces, genteel constructions of cultural capital. Suspiciously Euro-centric, they can seem
as little more than evidence of travel or learning. But beyond this facade, these poems test
the boundaries between artistic classes, alternately pointing categories out as distinct, and
treating them in ways that imply overlap. They also suggest an alternate manner of
construing the idea of collection at this historical point, emphasizing a fragmentary,
cyclic history rather than a clear teleology of artistic development.
The Poetry of Collection
Longfellow’s home, the Craigie house in Cambridge, is a museum that in some
ways embodies the idea of cyclic history. The poet initially rented a room there as a
young professor in 1837, attracted to a history which included its use as George
Washington’s headquarters during the Siege of Boston. When he married into the
wealthy Appleton family in 1843, he received the home as a wedding present from his
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father-in-law and continued to live there until his death in 1882. George Putnam’s Homes
of American Authors (1853), a volume that includes essays on the homes of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Catherine Sedgwick and Washington Irving, also prominently features the
Craigie House. The sketch begins with a description of the house’s “association with the
early days of our revolution”(266). These associations, the author writes, inhabit the
poet’s mind and ultimately influence the course of his poetry: “For ever after, his
imagination is a more lordly picture-gallery than that of ancestral halls”(269). The house
too is in turn influenced by Longfellow: “He who has written the Golden Legend knows,
best of all, the reality and significance of that life in the old Craigie House, whose dates,
except for this slight sketch, had almost dropped from history”(286). The celebrity of
Longfellow’s writing preserves the house in cultural memory, as under his ownership it
“has again acquired a distinctive interest in history”(278). Longfellow’s fame curates,
preserving a piece of American history that otherwise might have been lost, even as his
writing is shaped by this same history into a rich “picture gallery.” Both house and
intellect become museum spaces whose collections overlap. By providing a new chapter
in the history of the house, Longfellow imbues what is now known as the CraigieLongfellow House with enough cultural capital to continue to function as a museum that
showcases not just Longfellow’s tenure in the home but that of those generations of
inhabitants that preceded him. The poet’s ekphrastic work may have fallen short of
shoring up an aesthetic legacy akin to the biographical one, but shows a similar
appreciation of layered history, and aspires to a similar curatorial power.
The historical witness of artistic objects infused Longfellow’s poetry much as his
life. Longfellow’s writing on (primarily) European art functions as an alternate home
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collection, an accumulation of the works that could not or would not be collected on the
poet’s travels. In “The Old Bridge at Florence,” “Kéramos,” “Giotto’s Tower” and
Michael Angelo, Longfellow brings together site-specific works and work spaces that
most Americans had never seen firsthand. These poems reveal Longellow’s perspective
on how such objects might be categorized, assembled, and understood. His literary
collection presents a logic as clear as that of any material collection, but as we will see,
the understanding that underlies this collection is uniquely inclusive. While the trend in
American art collecting and exhibition moved increasingly toward the creation of a
comprehensive narrative for any given group of collected works, Longfellow’s poems
embrace instead the fragmentary, rejecting cohesion in favor of the suggestive part.
Longfellow’s poems, rather than seeing themselves as providing a teleology of artistic
development, emphasize the fragmentary nature of artistic production and artistic history,
inviting readers to see themselves as a piece in the narrative, rather than its ultimate
culmination.
The ekphrastic sonnet, “The Old Bridge at Florence”(1875), written after what
would be the poet’s last visit to Europe, marks the monument’s historical witness within
Florence, but functions as far more than a nostalgic marker of the city.71 The first lines
mark the bridge’s origin (“Taddeo Gaddi built me. I am old, / Five centuries old.”) and
the rest of the work unfolds the experiences that this structure has stood through,
including the battles between the factions representing the Holy Roman Emperor and the
papacy and the later expulsion of the Medici from Florence. The sonnet’s final,
awkwardly sensual lines—“And when I think that Michael Angelo/ Hath leaned on me, I
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71
All citations of this poem are from The Masque of Pandora and other Poems
151.
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glory in myself”—underline the importance of historical touch, even across centuries.
The bridge has no physical markers of its own and is described through the poem only as
“old,” its shape outlined through the touch of the creator that opens the poem, and the
form of Michelangelo that closes it. The imprint of this historical touch is more important
to understanding the work’s significance than any architectural feature, just as Thomas
Moore’s quill pen carries its significance entirely in its former owner’s fingerprint. The
value of these objects lies less in the specificity of their crafted features than in their
connection to varied historical and aesthetic moments.
At the same time, Longfellow’s choice of cultural monuments calls to mind the
intermixing of commerce and high art typical of his poetry. “The old bridge” is the literal
translation of the site more commonly known as the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge that since
its reconstruction by Gaddi in 1345 has housed the shops built into its structure. In
Longfellow’s time as in our own, these shops are jewelers, a fact which provides the
sense for the twelfth line of the poem: “Florence adorns me with her jewelry.” That the
bridge, which in the first eleven lines is described entirely in terms of historical
endurance, is also a central site of commerce, points to the intermixing of artistic
categories, and intermingling of past with present, that we see throughout Longfellow’s
work. As a monument, the bridge is both a historical site marked by Gaddi’s artistic
pedigree and Michelangelo’s leisured leaning, as well as a modern-day bustling center of
sale catering to the tourist industry. Commerce, artistry and history are likewise
intertwined in Longfellow’s most sustained ode to craftsmanship, “Kéramos”(1877).
“Kéramos,” a narrative poem following a Maine potter through an international
survey of ceramic traditions, is obscure today, but was considered culturally relevant
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enough at the moment of its composition that Harpers offered Longfellow $1,000 for the
rights to publish the ten-page poem in the December 1877 edition of the magazine.
Composed on the heels of the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia—at which
American potters had made a weak showing—“Kéramos” was largely intended as a call
to arms for American craftsmen. The poem had an afterlife in excerpt form in American
ceramics periodicals, and apparently accomplished some of its practical aims as latecentury potters refined their skills and gained some international renown. But the poem
also betrays a clear understanding of the place of original conception in visual craft (and
art). (Irmscher 124-137).
Throughout the poem, in which we follow the potter on a disembodied journey
across different ceramic traditions, central themes circle around originality and individual
conception. “All are made of clay” is a continuous refrain, and the creation and
destruction of pottery is a well-worn metaphor for the earthly cycles of birth and death.72
The unoriginality of the trope of man as clay is fitting, as originality is far from the
poem’s purpose or the purpose of the potter’s art. This art is made by “no hand” but
guided rather by the “Creator”(10). Though the narrator lavishes description on objects
and places, many of the craftsmen creating objects, including the poem’s protagonist, are
anonymous. A passage near the end of the poem underlines this anonymity:
…Never man,
As artist or as artisan,
Pursuing his own fantasies,
Can touch the human heart, or please,
Or satisfy our nobler needs,
As he who sets his willing feet
In Nature's footprints, light and fleet,
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72
All of the citations that follow are from the poem’s first publication in bookform, in the volume Kéramos and Other Poems (1878).
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And follows fearless where she leads. (24).
This perspective on both “artist” and “artisan” favors tradition and natural form over
original conception, at the same time as it points up, then conflates the distinction
between art and craft. Longfellow’s request to the editors of Harpers that the poem be
illustrated not with human figures but with images of the vessels and plates described
aligns well with this de-emphasis of the individual will (Letters 6: 289). Harpers
ultimately published the poem alongside of images of brawny craftsmen, attractive
onlookers, and global landscapes, which speak instead to a more traditional sense of
(masculine) artistry as located in specific personality and location.
Other examples of the blending of art and craft, original conception and imitation
abound throughout the poem. The poem within the poem, recording the journey through
the different regions of pottery-creation, is itself the product of creative hijacking:
Thus still the Potter sang, and still,
By some unconscious act of will,
The melody and even the words
Were intermingled with my thought,
As bits of colored thread are caught,
And woven in nests of birds. (5).
This seamless “intermingling” of song and thought produces the subject of the poem, the
speaker’s record of the origins of ceramic tradition. This record in turn credits the
intermixing of arts for producing ceramic excellence. The workshops of Gubbio “In
perfect finish emulate / Faeza, Florence, Pesaro”(12). One Italian ceramicist “caught /
Something of [Raphael’s] transcendent grace, / and into fictile fabrics wrought /
Suggestions of the master’s thought”(13). In Florence, the “more fragile forms of clay”
are “Hardly less beautiful” than the frescos of Lucca della Robbia (14). The images on
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the Imari porcelain of Japan are “The counterfeit and counterpart / Of Nature reproduced
in Art”(23). Imitation, throughout the poem, is both distinct from the real thing, and
entirely equal to it, both its “counterfeit and counterpart.”
“Kéramos” also presents a new approach to craft history in the context of latecentury American ceramics collecting. Such historical collecting, as J. Lockwood writes,
was often driven by a nativist as a well as aesthetic sensibility: “In saving china,
collectors often imagined themselves to be recovering a story of Anglo supremacy and to
be defending it against the threat of foreigners as well as the threat of lower-class rural
Anglos, both of whom were considered incapable of stewarding the nation’s historical
treasures”(70). Much American collecting was centered on the ceramics of the northeast
states, Northern European, and Asia, which had provided England and America with its
first models for porcelains. Collecting was by its very nature nostalgic, reflecting back
on an apparently simpler pre-industrial era. “Kéramos” undercuts this aesthetic in the
breadth of the ceramic genealogy that it presents, describing potters not just in Holland,
China and Japan, but also in Italy, Greece, and Egypt and proclaiming that “The human
race, /Of every tongue, of every place…Are kindred and allied by birth, / And made of
the same clay”(19). The country most important to American ceramics collectors,
England, is elided altogether. The poem’s editor was attuned to this gap, suggesting that
Longfellow include some references to Wedgewood ceramics, a popular American target
for collection, and he only replied that he did not see any way of “treating picturesquely”
such works in the context of the poem.73
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73
Letters 6:298. In spite of Longfellow’s broader aesthetic focus, contemporary
Anglo-American firms were likely the lens through which many readers understood
“Kéramos.” A local Boston ceramics dealer, for instance, inspired by the publication of
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The poem clearly had aims apart from nationalist nostalgia: the focus of
“Kéramos” is not retrospective, but forward-looking, albeit driven by a cyclic perspective
on craft history. The refrain of the poem, which begins with the potter’s refrain of “Turn,
turn my wheel!” centers readers in the idea that the work of the past helps to inform the
work of the present, rather than existing within its own hermetically sealed history. The
last lines of the poem emphasize this view of history and of art: “Behind us in our path
we cast / The broken potshards of the past, / And all are ground to dust at last, / And
trodden into clay”(25). Longfellow presents the value of the art of the past not in its
wholeness as a preserved and categorized object, but in its existence as a part, a “broken
potshard” that makes up a piece of the “clay” of the present. Far from the preservationist
aims of the traditional collector, the narrator of “Kéramos” understands the value of past
artistry through the processes that it instructs rather than the unscathed objects that it
passes down. The poem’s emphasis on the permeability of influence and the fragility of
the individual art-object makes for an unusually motley collection, one that provides little
cohesion beyond the refrain of movement: “Turn, turn, my wheel!”
The tropes familiar from “The Old Bridge at Florence” and “Kéramos” continue
to develop in “Giotto’s Tower” and Michael Angelo, in spite of some superficial
divergences. By calling attention to the artists’ names in the titles of these works,
Longfellow introduces artistic individuality as a central concern, an idea that “Kéramos,”
titled for the material of production rather than the producer, and “The Old Bridge,”
clearly evade. Michael Angelo in particular carries a biographical concern with the
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“Kéramos,” presented Longfellow with a commemorative pitcher featuring the poet’s
face on both sides and the titles of his most celebrated works along the spout. The pitcher
was created by Wedgewood. (Longfellow National Historic Site).
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individual creator through the drama. But both Michael Angelo and “Giotto’s Tower”
openly question the power of the isolated artist and present creation as a process taken up
by many hands rather than a single product depending on individualized originality. The
“broken potshards” of Kéramos are picked up in these latter poems in the form of a focus
on fragmentation, and a sense that the art of the present consists of a reconfiguration of
the pieces of the past. Both works, like “Kéramos” and “The Old Bridge,” embrace the
cross-pollination of craft and fine art.
“Giotto’s Tower,”(1867) provides a sense of the different terms that Longfellow
consolidates under the idea of fragmentation and partiality.74 A synopsis of the
deceptively complex sonnet might gloss the poem as a celebration of the beauty of the
famously unfinished tower, in spite of its incompletion. As Robert Gale writes: “Many
sweet, restrained, uncomplaining persons devoted to answering the requests of the Holy
Spirit lack nothing but a halo such as artists paint above saints’ foreheads. So it is with
Giotto’s tower”(94). A closer reading produces a subtly different conclusion: Giotto’s
tower is perfect because of, not in spite of, its apparent lack. The sonnet’s first octave
introduces this idea through its reversal: figures who fall short of perfection precisely
because of their apparent flawlessness, who “are in their completeness incomplete.” The
restrained structure of these lines performs the self-containment of their subjects, who are
too simplistically whole:
How many lives, made beautiful and sweet
By self-devotion and by self-restraint,
Whose pleasure is to run without complaint
On unknown errands of the Paraclete,
Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet,
Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint
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74
Citations are from the poem’s first collection in Flower-de-Luce.
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Around the shining forehead of the saint,
And are in their completeness incomplete! (49).
The earnest Christians of these lines “fail of the nimbus” of sainthood not because of any
lack on their part but rather because of a too-great “completeness.” What they “want” is
not any addition but an absence, “unshodden feet,” and the sacrifice that this absence
implies. Instead of making such sacrifice, they are turned inward with “self-devotion”
and “self-restraint,” deriving “pleasure” from the idea of self-denial, of running “without
complaint / On unknown errands.” The lines themselves enact the self-enclosure of these
figures through the ABBA rhyme scheme and end-stopped lines. Similarly, the opening
line’s apparent question (“How many lives”) becomes an exclamation by the final line
(“in their completeness incomplete!”), breaking down the promise of a dialogue or
exchange beyond the solipsistic speaker. Like the “beautiful” lives, these lines are
characterized primarily by restraint.
While these devices are familiar features of the sonnet-form, the final sestet of the
poem marks a dramatic shift. Focusing on the perfect imperfection of the tower, this
section challenges self-containment in both form and subject:
In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's tower,
The lily of Florence blossoming in stone, —
A vision, a delight, and a desire, —
The builder's perfect and centennial flower,
That in the night of ages bloomed alone,
But wanting still the glory of the spire. (50).
The interlacing rhyme scheme, the feminine rhyme of lines 9 and 12, and the dashes at
the end of lines 10 and 11 open up the form of this sestet, loosening the restrained form
of the preceding octave. The subject likewise opens, from the “self-restraint” of the
previous section to the organic “blossoming” in stone of the tower. Giotto’s tower is
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described not in terms of beauty, as the aspirants of the previous octave, but in terms of
growth and potentiality. It “bloom[s]”; it is a “desire” and a “vision,” rather than a static
object. The history of the tower, or Campanile, tells a similar story: designed and begun
by Giotto at the end of his life in 1334, it was left unfinished at his death in 1337. The
design was then picked up by Andrea Pisano, who in his tenure as builder was faithful to
Giotto’s original plans. Finally, Francesco Talenti took over the building in 1348 and
completed it in 1359, though he altered Giotto’s design by omitting the tower’s proposed
spire. (Trachtenberg 3-5).
The tower, then, is literally incomplete, but nonetheless “perfect”; it reverses the
terms of the previous stanza, and is complete in its incompleteness. The tower is
overhung always by the shadow-structure of the unconstructed spire, much as the saint of
the octave before is graced with the immaterial “nimbus” that signals his “perfection”.
The tower is “Giotto’s” because his blueprints form its foundation, but it is also the tower
of the “builder,” who made the choice to leave the completion of structure in the minds of
viewers. Longfellow’s poem, which in its title seems to defend single artistic authorship,
in fact questions the validity of understanding only the isolated artist-creator as the source
of “perfect” art, and opens up the idea of perfection to include the collaboratively
produced and the unfinished. Within the schema of “Giotto’s Tower,” the sacrifice of
some part of the ideal design creates a form of completion that goes far beyond material
understandings of conclusion.
In Michael Angelo, Longfellow continues to use the trope of the fragment to
question the nature of originality and individuality, and in so doing defines the terms for
his literary canon. The subject of Michael Angelo ensures that Longfellow’s debate
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occurs against basic cultural assumptions about artistic production, particularly
assumptions held about the European high-art canon. Lene Østermark-Johansen, in her
study of Michelangelo’s nineteenth-century reception, calls him “the great individual
who becomes the receptacle for a wide range of other people’s projections”(17).
Longfellow’s “projection” is distinct in its embrace of the complexity of Michelangelo’s
work, including its literary and visual loose ends. Michael Angelo may confirm Margaret
Fuller’s understanding of Longfellow’s writing as a “tastefully arranged Museum,” a
collection in which the parts remain distinct and fail to create a cohesive whole, but as I
show in this section, such a collection was based both on an older model of the museum
collection and a newer model of criticism.
Collecting Michelangelo
Postbellum, high-profile American art collectors, in striking contrast to
Longfellow-as-literary-collector, were concerned with presenting a teleological view of
art history, and by showing through their works a narrative of gradual artistic advance.
The cabinet of curiosities model was being gradually superseded by a mode of collection
and of exhibition that functioned by exclusion, creating a focused narrative of art and
leaving out works that did not contribute to this narrative. When wealthy collectors like
James Jackson Jarves and Thomas Jefferson Bryan began buying the works that would
eventually form the first significant collections of European Renaissance painting in
America, they collected with a newly defined sense of purpose. Though the collections
were spotty in quality, their aim was toward providing “something like a history of the
progress of painting”(Miller 33). Just as American ceramics collectors focused on certain
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types of works in creating a narrative of national identity, collectors began to look to art
for the narration of specific stories. Jarves’s collection of early Italian Renaissance
paintings, for instance, told the now well-known story of the development of certain
aesthetic characteristics—linear perspective, chiaroscuro, anatomical study—into the
High Renaissance. Such narratives necessarily had the effect of limiting the eclecticism
of earlier-century galleries and aiming toward, if not always arriving at, an idea of
wholeness.
At the same time as this mode of art collection was taking hold, critics and
translators were making new strides in the compilation and publication of Michelangelo’s
poetry. The nineteenth-century was, as Østermark-Johansen writes, “the century when
Michelangelo became a text, in addition to his previous reputation as a painter, sculptor
and architect”(22). The first English biography of the Michelangelo, by Richard Duppa,
appeared in 1806 and can be credited with inspiring Anglophone interest in the artist’s
poetry. Titled The Life and Literary Works of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, it reprinted the
entire Italian first edition of the poetry, published twenty letters, and included a handful
of commissioned translations by Robert Southey and William Wordsworth. By 1869, the
biography had been through five editions. In 1840, John Edward Taylor published a
monograph on the poems alone, translating 35 in English prose, and introducing the
whole with a 100-page essay. John S. Harford’s voluminous 1857 biography likewise
highlights poetry, and includes translations of nine madrigals and 22 sonnets. No fewer
than eight Italian editions of Michelangelo’s poetry were published during the nineteenth
century, one of which, Cesare Guasti’s 1863 text, was widely available in England. Later
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in the century, both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Addington Symonds worked on
translations. (Østermark-Johansen 33-50).
The interest in narrative cohesion that increasingly shaped art collection is also
reflected in these textual collections of Michelangelo. Works not seen as in line with
Michelangelo’s artistic image, works that “upset [the Victorian] image of him as the
divine, grand and melancholy artist” (Østermark-Johansen 60) were either left
untranslated or polished into a nearly unrecognizable form. The apparent lack of polish in
the poems—which manuscripts show to have gone through extensive revision—was
often seen by editors and translators as “yet another instance of the artist’s non-finito: a
difficulty with finishing his works which surely could not be intentional” and so was
“corrected” with a filling in of gaps (31). The lighthearted or cynical aspects of the
canon, including long burlesque poems in terza rima and ottava rima, not in keeping
with perceptions of the artist, were not translated into English in the nineteenth century
(60). Michelangelo’s homoerotic sonnets were not faithfully translated until the end of
the century, and with this work came an accompanying shift of narrative on the part of
the translator, Symonds, who “saw in Michelangelo a potential source for the exploration
of ‘sexual inversion’ and its manifestation in the individual”(47).
The nineteenth century was also the century in which Michelangelo’s visual
works became accessible to a much broader English-speaking audience, although
responses to this canon likewise suggest a very partial embrace of the work. The bulk of
Michelangelo’s visual canon—consisting largely of monumental marble statues,
architectural works and frescos— defied collection and circulation in a way that the
verbal work did not, but some images found entry into a newly classified public space.
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Today, a quarter of Michelangelo’s graphic work resides in three English collections, a
shift that took place largely in the course of the nineteenth century, as both drawings and
manuscripts passed from private to public hands. The Royal Collection at Windsor, the
British Museum, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford all contain significant
collections of work that, in the nineteenth century at least, were considered an
indisputable part of Michelangelo’s canon (Østermark-Johansen 65). The reception of
these works by British audiences, though, indicates an unspoken bias echoing that toward
the literary work. In spite of the large number of sketches and partial architectural design
in public British collections, critics of Michelangelo’s work such as Symonds and John
Ruskin almost always preferred to discuss the relatively polished drawings. The looser
and more apparently incomplete sketches and studies received much less critical
attention, even as writers professed the importance of these works to understanding
Michelangelo’s process. The same aesthetic biases in both cases pushed editors and
critics toward considering only works that conformed to a uniform conception of the
artist. (75-116).
This idea of the uniformity of his canon also informed Michelangelo’s American
reception. Emerson typifies a desire to see the artist in terms that stress the cohesion of
his canon. He formalized his own views on the artist in an early lecture titled “Michel
Angelo Buonaroti”(1835) which emphasizes the unity of Michelangelo’s life and art, his
universality, and his independence from outside influence. The introduction to the lecture
outlines the span of Michelangelo’s life in these terms:
There are few lives of eminent men that are harmonious: few that furnish in all
the facts an image corresponding with their fame. But all things recorded of
Michel Angelo Buonaroti agree together. He lived one life: he pursued one
career….Every line in his biography might be read with wholesome effect. (99)
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Michelangelo’s interest as a subject of biography lies foremost in his story’s unity of
effect, the manner in which the moral perfection of the life conforms easily to the
physical perfection of the artwork. While Emerson presents a very generalist vision of the
artist—he admits in his somewhat convoluted introductory remarks that to many in the
audience “much more is known than I know” of the artist’s life and work— this
generality is in fact key to the cohesion of his argument (99). The narrative that he creates
depends on the absence of any details that might disrupt the ideal of perfect unity.
The desire to see in the canon a unified effect did not always produce the
adulation that infuses Emerson’s response. In some cases, the extremity of the criticism
swung in the other direction, while a perspective on the canon’s cohesion remained fixed.
Few writers fleshed out this dramatically polarized approach to the artist more
completely—or more famously—than John Ruskin, whose analysis of Michelangelo in
his lecture “The Relation Between Michael Angelo and Tintoret,”(delivered 1870-1,
printed 1872) provides a good background to Longfellow’s treatment of the artist in
Michael Angelo. The contexts in which the two discuss the artist are similar, and yet the
ends at which they each arrive are divergent enough that Ruskin’s essay casts light on the
elements of the drama—especially its appreciation of Michelangelo’s contradictions—
that can be taken for granted in isolation. Both writers are centrally concerned with the
opposition of craftsmanship and fine art. Both are equally concerned, at least implicitly,
with the accessibility of the artist’s work to audiences. But if the analogy for Ruskin’s
collection is the Oxford gallery collection that his lecture purports to bring to a broader
public, the analogy for Longfellow’s work is the older, more eclectic public gallery that is
by its nature democratically inclusive.
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Ruskin claims to have composed his lecture to encourage Oxford students and
even “strangers visiting the Galleries” to take advantage of the University’s recently
acquired collection of Michelangelo drawings, but this apparently democratizing purpose
is superficial at best (3). Not only did the speech almost necessarily have a negative
impact on admirers of Michelangelo—Edward Burne-Jones “wanted to drown himself in
the Surrey Canal” after a private reading of the papers—but Ruskin’s analysis of the
artwork casts doubt on his alleged aim of encouraging a viewership (Burne-Jones 18). He
notes, for instance, that deep aesthetic flaws damage many works to the extent that they
“ought never to be exhibited to the general public” and even those works remaining are
best seen only by artists: “Incipient methods of design are not, and ought not to be,
subjects of earnest inquiry to other people”(7-8). Ruskin’s lecture, then is not primarily
directed at a general public, but rather targets those few who “ought” to reference the
works in question.
Even for that select group, Ruskin finds little positive knowledge to be derived
from a study of Michelangelo’s work. Many of the writer’s criticisms of Michelangelo
center on the lack of technical skill in his work. Ruskin understands the years from
“1480 to 1520” as a “deadly catastrophe” in the world of art, led by the triumvirate of
Raphael/Michelangelo/Titian and only eventually countered by Tintoretto who “stands up
for a last fight, for Venice and the old time”(13). Bad workmanship is a central fault of
this earlier group, and Ruskin takes Michelangelo to task for his execution of works
either “hastily and incompletely done” or shoddily completed so that “the best qualities
of it perished”(16). This artist “lived in world of court intrigue” (as opposed to Tintoretto
and his peers, who “lived as craftsmen”) and criticized oil painting (which Ruskin
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considered the highest form of art) because he “had neither the skill to lay a single touch
of good oil-painting, nor the patience to overcome even its elementary difficulties”(20,
25). In attributing Michelangelo’s most significant failings to technical deficit, Ruskin
emphasizes the division between what he sees as courtly but incompetent fine art, and
humble but proficient craftsmanship.
The final paragraphs of the lecture confirm this polarized understanding of art
practice. If Michelangelo’s failure as a craftsman is evidenced by the destruction of his
works by time, the mark of the accomplished craftsman lies in being threatened by the
vagaries of human judgment. Ruskin ends his digressive lecture with a long description
of Tintoretto’s Paradise, “the most precious work of art of any kind, whatsoever, now
existing in the world”(44). This huge oil on canvas, he warns, is “on the eve of final
destruction,” as a result of impending reconstructive work in the council chamber where
it is housed in Venice (44). The contrast to Michelangelo’s work in the Oxford collection
is implicit: while this artist’s loose sketches are sheltered within the preservationist realm
of the museum, Tintoretto’s supreme craftsmanship is at the mercy of the outside world,
sheltered only by the political mundanity of the council chamber. The lecture thus ends
with an appeal to readers to offer this work the same protection that they have granted
what is deemed fine art, to recall “the treasures that we forget, while we amuse ourselves
with the poor toys”(44-45). Instead of encouraging listeners to visit Michelangelo’s work,
the piece concludes in encouraging them to sequester Tintoretto’s, to remove this work
from the dangers of the public realm that can threaten even good craftsmanship.
Collection, craftsmanship and artistry are for Longfellow as for Ruskin central
terms in the consideration of Michelangelo’s work, but these words take on a radically
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different meaning in Longfellow’s play. Rather than place Michelangelo solidly in the
category of either craft or high art, Longfellow questions the cultural assumptions that
give rise to these divisions. Michelangelo occupies the space, alternately, of each
category: he was nursed by a stonemason’s wife, but also claims the aristocratic heritage
that the drama connects to the fine arts. The play embraces time’s destructive touch and
the artist’s tendency to leave works incomplete as entry points for a new generation of
artists, rather than evidence of a shoddy artistic practice. Longfellow’s vision of artists in
Michael Angelo is better understood through an older, more democratic museum than
through Ruskin’s Oxford gallery, in which art is “little likely” to be either “useful or
dangerous to my pupils” since “no student has ever asked me a single question respecting
these drawings, or, so far as I could see, taken the slightest interest in them”(6).
Longfellow’s play, unlike Ruskin’s lecture, is populated by visitors: critics who discuss
Michelangelo’s work, and friends who move through the artist’s life. Both problematize
one-sided characterizations of the artist’s life. Inclusive rather than exclusive, Michael
Angelo incorporates many biographical versions of the artist into its narrative, and in so
doing invites a nuanced understanding of the life and work. Longfellow’s drama, though
it remained in a desk drawer until after his death, ultimately granted the kind of
accessibility that Ruskin’s writing (and perhaps also the Oxford galleries) only professed.
.
Michael Angelo’s Open Collection
The critical treatment of Longfellow’s Michael Angelo provides a good starting
point to a reassessment of the text. The work is, of course, a drama, but even
Longfellow’s earliest critics were dismissive of its status as “real” drama. Written in
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blank verse, and supplemented with only the thinnest of stage-settings, the play focuses
almost entirely on character development and has little narrative pull. With its emphasis
on long, abstract monologues and its complete absence of any stage direction, it is
difficult to imagine the play’s performance. As a reviewer in The Spectator writes in
1883: “with all its merits—and it certainly contains fine passages—it is dramatic only in
form” (1587). Other reviews, such as the 1884 acknowledgement in Lippincott’s
Magazine, refer to the work more often as “poem” than drama. Horace Scudder’s
biographical introduction to The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow (1922) takes the assumption of the insignificance of the dramatic frame to
another, more personal level: “The caution against mistaking a poet’s dramatic
assumption for his own character and expression is of less force when applied to one in
whom the dramatic power was but slightly developed; and the whole poem of ‘Michael
Angelo,’ taken in connection with the time and circumstances of its composition, may
fairly be regarded as in some respects Longfellow’s apologia”(xx). The dramatic
scaffolding of the play, because “but slightly developed,” simply holds up a thin scrim
through which we are amply justified in reading the facts and feelings of Longfellow’s
late life.
Contemporary criticism reiterates this tendency toward biographical readings of
the play. Charles Calhoun’s 2004 biography of the poet discusses Michael Angelo briefly,
considering it as a reflection of Longfellow’s “own situation as an artist facing
death”(244). Christoph Irmscher’s 2006 book of essays on the poet, Longfellow Redux,
also depends significantly on biography, but takes an opposite tack in its analysis of
Michael Angelo. Devoting a full five pages to the play—the longest sustained discussion
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since its publication—Irmscher finds in the central protagonist a figure who “attracted
and appalled” Longfellow, but who in spite of their similar life stages at the time of the
play’s composition, is more anti-type than model. As Irmscher writes, “Michelangelo is,
in a sense a study of everything Longfellow was not—an artist consumed by, made
desperate even, by his desire to have the ‘labor of his hand’ match the grand, innovative
conceptions in his head”(142). Irmsher sees Longfellow as a writer who felt no shame in
literary borrowings and never strove for a modern notion of aesthetic originality. This
assessment stands in contrast to the critic’s characterization of Michelangelo as an artist
who embodies precisely these ideals of “innovative conception.”
In both of these readings of the work, Michelangelo is a stable signifier of high
art, devoted to originality as an artistic ideal. And yet, it is precisely this stability that
Michael Angelo takes to task. The discrepancy between Calhoun and Irmscher’s nearly
opposed readings lies only in whether the critics take Longfellow to subscribe to a stable
set of “high art” ideals—and certainly the pendulum in recent Longfellow criticism has
swung more to Irmscher’s side, with critics increasingly favoring a more inclusive
craftsman’s ideal in discussing Longfellow’s “derivativeness.” This perspective on
Longfellow’s work as located to one side of debates about originality and metrical
innovation is an overwhelmingly positive one, freeing criticism of Longfellow, or indeed
that of any number of other “genteel” poets, from an undercurrent of defensiveness. It
locates Longfellow as “middle class” in a manner that does not demand apology. My aim
in reading Michael Angelo is to submit the figure of the Renaissance artist to this same
nuanced scrutiny. In an examination of Longfellow’s Michelangelo, we find that the
stable reading of the artist as original, monumental, and unified creator so prevalent in
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nineteenth-century artistic criticism, quickly unhinges. His role, instead, is strikingly
similar to the in-between “middle-class” place that recent critics have found for
Longfellow. The poet’s greatest accomplishment in Michael Angelo may have been to
redefine this unlikely artist-figure as an emblem for his own literary craft. Placing
Michelangelo between the fluid categories of art and craft, unity and fragmentation,
history and contemporaneity, showcases Longfellow’s innovation as a cultural critic at
the same time as it reveals his artistic self-perception to be located between these
extremes.
The opening “Dedication” sonnet in Michael Angelo: A Fragment (1883)
functions as a curatorial note, providing a sense of the mode of artistic collection in
Longfellow’s drama. Far from Ruskin’s hermetic gallery, the collection of Michael
Angelo is open and fluid, equipped with a permeable sense of originality and historical
influence. Though this mode is described here in terms of the architecture of literature,
the ideas translate to later discussions of the visual arts:
Nothing that is shall perish utterly,
But perish only to revive again
In other forms, as clouds restore in rain
The exhalations of the land and sea.
Men build their houses from the masonry
Of ruined tombs; the passion and the pain
Of hearts, that long have ceased to beat, remain
To throb in hearts that are, or are to be.
So from old chronicles, where sleep in dust
Names that once filled the world with trumpet tones,
I build this verse; and flowers of song have thrust
Their roots among the loose disjointed stones,
Which to this end I fashion as I must.
Quickened are they that touch the Prophet's bones. 75
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Michael Angelo: A Drama 5. All Michael Angelo citations refer to this 1884
Houghton, Mifflin and Company edition unless otherwise noted.
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This perspective on artistic creation resonates clearly with Longfellow’s other ekphrastic
work, in both its lack of emphasis on original conception and its natural analogies. The
central trope of building homes (or art-objects) from the pieces of the past underlines the
sense of historical continuity that is at the foundation of all of Longfellow’s accounts of
creation, especially that in “Kéramos.” As creation in “Kéramos,” Michael Angelo’s
historical continuity is enabled precisely by breaking apart the forms of the past: “ruined
tombs” become “houses,” and Longfellow’s own poem is constructed alternately of “old
chronicles” and “loose disjointed stones,” built with little personal volition (“I fashion as
I must”) or hope for future endurance. Artistic originality or conception is in this sense of
minimal importance. As in “Giotto’s Tower,” the artistic product is also described in
terms of natural cycles: clouds that become rain, flowers that vine through the structure.76
It is fitting, then, that in the 1884 Houghton-Mifflin illustrated edition of the poem, this
“Dedication” is printed in a broken piece of stone from a building-plaque, with a hazy
image of the ruins of the Roman Forum in the background and some trees in the
foreground. The artistic space into which the “Dedication” leads us is one of both historic
destruction and organic growth. This notion of artistry is at odds with modern notions of
high art, inspiration and artistic will. As Irmscher writes, “There is little here of what
Henry James, in one of his prefaces, called ‘the muffled majesty of authorship’”(143).
Instead, we find an understanding of artistry that is radically open, where works create
themselves from the pieces of the past.
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76
These “flowers of song” refer to the translations of Michelangelo’s poetry that
Longfellow had initially considered including in the drama, but that he eventually excised
and published in Kéramos and Other Poems (1878). See Irmscher 218-19.
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It is perhaps inevitable given this openness, that conclusions and inconclusions
are a source of concern both in the “Dedication” and in the larger work as a whole.
Longfellow’s ideas about historical influence and continuity prevent the arrival at any
conclusion that carries the stamp of personal artistic volition. The phrase “to this end” in
the penultimate line of the “Dedication” illustrates these concerns, speaking both to a
preoccupation with death and a concern with artistic conclusions. In the context of the
last lines, the demonstrative “this end” is ambiguous, gesturing both to the literal “end” of
the sonnet and to “end” as “purpose” (apparently the purpose of verse-building).
“Quickened are they that touch the prophet’s bones” ties up the sonnet, reiterating the
ongoing theme of death and rebirth that we see in the opening lines (“Nothing that is shall
perish utterly…”) as well as the morbid sense of building “houses from the masonry/ Of
ruined tombs.” As we will see, the drama as a whole is wrapped up in these same
questions—how to end itself, how to mark the end of life—but is far from as tidily
contained as the opening “Dedication.” The drama’s lack of real conclusion, its existence
as “Fragment” is an essential characteristic of its structure, pointing to an aesthetic ideal
of overflow and a fundamental inability to mark isolated endings.
The “Dedication” provides a foretaste of the major forces—craftsmanship and
fine art, derivativeness and originality, history and present, conclusions inconclusive—
that underlie the drama. But if “Giotto’s Tower” functions both structurally and
thematically as a defense of the incomplete detail, then Michael Angelo offers a much
more divided argument. Perhaps the most structurally broken and conceptually derivative
of Longfellow’s works, its idealized and hyper-masculine protagonist nonetheless offers
persuasive arguments for unity and aesthetic originality throughout the play. The
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centering conflict of the work is, I argue, the extent to which fragmentation enters the life
narrative of a character aligned with the admittedly problematic concept of artistic unity.
Neither true protagonist nor anti-hero, Michelangelo is for Longfellow a figure who tests
the boundaries of isolated individuality and iconoclastic genius, and who questions
whether an artist can attain self-contained wholeness. Most strikingly, unlike the false
dialogue that initiates “Giotto’s Tower,” this question is in Michael Angelo an honest
one, and one that ends in a less definitive declaration. In this sense, the work supports
Longfellow’s position as a “middle-class” writer, but rely on elements that go well
beyond Fuller’s conception of the term, including artistic self-awareness and an interest
in formal qualities as a conduit to meaning.
The textual history of Michael Angelo confirms the work’s investment in openendedness: the play, which remained unfinished in Longfellow’s lifetime, literalizes the
argument for the fragment in “Giotto’s Tower.” The first published edition was based on
an interpretation of Longfellow’s manuscript, with footnotes and illustrations supplied by
the editors. The structurally fragmentary nature of the published document is undeniable:
when it was found in Longfellow’s desk drawer after his death in 1882, it carried the
label “A Fragment” on its first page (Writings of HWL 46). Editors have chosen whether
or not to emphasize this incomplete state in their own printings. At the poem’s first
publication in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1883 editors dropped the subtitle “A
Fragment” in favor of “A Drama” and made no mention of the work’s unfinished state.
When it was printed in a lavishly illustrated book edition by Houghton, Mifflin and
Company later that same year, this subtitle became “A Dramatic Poem” and a publishers’
note told readers that the work “was written by Mr. Longfellow mainly about ten years
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before his death, but was kept by him for occasional revision, and printed after his death
in The Atlantic Monthly from his final copy.” It was first anthologized in Longfellow’s
Poetical Works of 1884. Other editions, such as the 1886 Riverside Edition of
Longfellow’s collected writings, and the 1898 Complete Poetical Works reinstate
Longfellow’s original subtitle and stress the unfinished nature of the work. The
comprehensive Riverside Edition also includes an appendix of the scenes that Longfellow
excised from his final draft, including a final scene at the artist’s death-bed.
The notes to the Riverside edition and the manuscripts on which they are based
highlight the difficulty, often elided by editors, of determining Longfellow’s “final copy.”
This edition includes an appendix documenting the scenes, or expanded versions of
scenes, that Longfellow excised from his final draft. None of these scenes appear in any
form in the text or editorial apparatus of the Atlantic Monthly or the Houghton Mifflin
editions. But within the final text of the Riverside edition, the editor places some sections
of text in parentheses, indicating that these were passages included in the play only after
the first full draft had been written. These passages appear unmarked and integrated into
the final copy of the Atlantic Monthly and Houghton Mifflin texts. And while the
publisher of this latter edition notes simply that the play is printed “from [Longfellow’s]
final copy,” the Riverside publisher states that “[i]t is not possible to say […] what might
have been the final form of Michael Angelo had its author chosen to put it into type
instead of leaving it in his desk”(viv; 49). Critics have followed the earlier editions of the
text in glossing over the problematic nature of the “final copy” and the text-as-fragment.
Based on Longfellow’s own manuscript drafts, the unfinished nature of the work
and its subtitling as “A Fragment” is not an incidental fact of history, but an essential
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characteristic of the poem’s construction. Longfellow’s final working draft of the drama,
on which the Riverside and other published editions are based, emphasizes process and
parts over a stable document. Recorded in thick bound book with Michael Angelo
embossed on the spine, the document is written in pencil and marked by frequent
erasures, crossed-out passages, and marginal notes. The draft also includes a section at
the end of the work consisting entirely of scenes or passages marked as “rejected” or
“omitted,” suggesting that Longfellow saw the work as defined more by the process of its
creation than its narrative beginning and end. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Papers).
The plays’s intial draft emphasizes fragmentation even more dramatically. Unlike
many of Longfellow’s first drafts, which he wrote in a fairly continuous manner from
beginning to end, this draft of Michael Angelo is literally written in fragments, recorded
on scraps of paper and the back sides of other documents, creating an editorial nightmare
of Dickinsonian proportions. Early lines and scenes for the drama were collected in a
marble-papered folder now in the Houghton Library, the cover of which is hand-titled
“Michael Angelo.” The contents are motley: there are two pencil sketches of Vittoria
Colonna, single lines of text on small cards, sections of scenes or exchanges between
characters on notebook paper, and outlines of the work as it takes shape. Many of the
shorter scraps reflect the drama’s preoccupation with death: one card reads simply “Old
grave-stones of the past,” while another prints the line “Great death, the King of shadows,
with a touch /Cured all our evils” on the back of a business card. (The most jarring
juxtaposition of form and content is a monologue labeled “Death” written out on the back
of a list of student absences). Compared to other contemporaneous manuscripts—such a
“Kéramos,” the first draft of which is a chronologically-dated clean copy— the thematic
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focus and the general disorganization of these papers is striking. (Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow Papers).
The remarkably haphazard format of Michael Angelo’s drafts was likely due at
least in part to the wide span of time over which the play was composed. Considering that
the work that takes up less than 200 broadly-margined, generously illustrated pages in the
Houghton-Mifflin edition, Longfellow was unusually long at work on the play. Though
most of the scenes were conceived in the early 1870s, Longfellow wrote and dated the
earliest part of the poem—a striking scene in which Michelangelo recounts an
apocalyptic dream—in 1850. On April 21, 1872, he wrote to lifelong friend George
Washington Greene, “I have been writing a poem, which I think will please you. It is not
yet finished, but enough is written to make me see my way clear. It is a dramatic poem to
be called ‘Michael Angelo.’…The subject is beautiful, and I shall be disappointed if you
do not like it”(5: 534). By May of that year he could write in his journal that “the Poem in
its first form is complete”(qtd. in Tucker 343). The work then existed in a more or less
finished state for the final decade of Longfellow’s life, a decade during which he
published seven full volumes of new work, one of which, Kéramos and Other Poems,
included the translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets originally slated for inclusion in the
drama.77 But Longfellow approached the dramatic work with patience and an emphasis
on process over completion. “I want it,” he wrote in his journal in March 1872, “for a
long and delightful occupation”(qtd. in Tucker 342). Longfellow’s method of
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77
These volumes are: Christus: A Mystery (1872); Aftermath (1873); The
Hanging of the Crane (1875); The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (1875);
Kéramos and Other Poems (1878); Ultima Thule (1880); and In the Harbor (1882).
Longfellow also published The Early Poems (1878) but this volume consists of work
from many decades before, most of which had been published in newspapers and
magazines.
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composition, which proceeded scene by scene (and scrap by scrap) rather than
chronologically, emphasizes his understanding of the work as a composite of parts rather
than a unified whole.
In fact, the fragmentary nature of the work infuses even its narrative action and
setting, both of which are minimally developed. Longfellow realized this apparent failing
in the late-life of story of the artist, writing in his journal when he was first beginning the
work: “The subject attracts me; but is difficult to treat dramatically for want of unity of
action, and plot in general”(qtd. in Tucker 342). Very little happens to Michelangelo in
the course of the play, which spans roughly twelve years: he stays in Rome, attempting to
complete various artworks, interacting with other characters that drift in and out of the
scenes and city, and performing long-winded monologues on the merits of various artistic
media. The play is divided into three acts, the first two of which have six scenes, the
final, eight. Michelangelo is at the center of most of these scenes, though some focus
entirely on peripheral action, such as the would-be love affair between Cardinal Ippolito
and Julia Gonzago, the friend of Michelangelo’s adored Vittoria Colonna. Seventeen
characters populate the play at different points, each contributing to the diffusion of any
real narrative form. Scenes center alternately on Vittoria’s exile and death; Cardinal
Ippolito’s death; the political conflicts around Michelangelo’s Last Judgment; the
complacency of the painter Fra Sebastiano; the artistic development of the jeweler-turned
sculptor Cellini; the aesthetic discussions of Michelangelo, Titian, and Georgio Vasari;
and the musings of an anonymous monk who longs to make a pilgrimage to Rome. The
majority of these events are disconnected from one another.
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Michael Angelo, then, is a work that willfully defies the ideal of aesthetic unity,
and that, like “Giotto’s Tower,” argues for the artistic value of the unfinished. This
argument is complicated by Michelangelo himself, whom the other characters hail
throughout the play as an artist embodying unity and the ability to complete artistic
undertakings. But Longfellow’s Michelangelo, in his words and his actions, resists these
characterizations, suggesting that biographical and aesthetic fragmentation can offer the
basis for a new evaluation of his function within the play. Longfellow’s writing shows
that the fragmentary nature of Michelangelo’s work does not detract from its value, but
rather allows viewers a more active engagement with it. Like Giotto’s multi-generational
tower, the work in Michelangelo’s canon invites completion, and its power lies precisely
in this invitation. A viewing of the work is necessarily a collaborative act, throwing into
question the association of artistic originality with the isolated creator.
Longfellow in Pieces
Michael Angelo is unique among nineteenth-century depictions of the artist for
the radical fragmentation that characterizes all aspects of its construction. The text is
broken on many levels: in the diversity of its historical influence, in its shattered political
landscape, and in its dramatically abbreviated conclusion. Through these fissures we can
see Longfellow’s contribution to the modern myth of Michelangelo, a myth to which
Ruskin, Emerson, Fuller, Lowell and many others contributed in each their own way.
Longfellow’s Michelangelo is characterized by instability and constant growth. Against a
backdrop of secondary characters who attempt to label him in fixed terms as master and
teacher, Michelangelo repeatedly stresses his development as a student and the insecurity
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of his status as an artist. Michelangelo sets himself apart from his contemporaries in
embracing an aesthetic of flux, but his appreciation for change and movement is also at
the root of the play’s preoccupation with death, and its ultimate inability to arrive at any
conclusive ending.
Fissures appear in the text through the sheer number of scholarly sources to which
Longfellow is indebted. These sources imply what the text later confirms: that
Longfellow’s Michelangelo is a multi-faceted figure, unable to be contained through an
argument as polemical or self-contained as Ruskin or Emerson’s. By the time that
Longfellow began writing his play in earnest in the early 1870s, many secondary sources
on Michelangelo—both recent and historical— existed in English, and many more in
Italian. If the nineteenth century was “the century when Michelangelo became a text,”
then Longfellow’s Michael Angelo is arguably the contemporaneous work that best
translates this scholarship (22). A project in scholarly consolidation, the drama aimed to
bring these sometimes erudite, sometimes untranslated documents to a mass audience.
Emilio Goggio, in “The Sources of Longfellow’s Michael Angelo” identifies
Longfellow’s principle references as biographies and histories written by authors ranging
from Michelangelo’s to Longfellow’s own contemporaries. They include, from earliest to
latest, Juan de Valdes’s Alfabeto Christiano (1546), Giorgio Vasari’s Vite dei pui
eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti (1550), Asconio Condivi’s Vita di Michelangelo
Buonarroti (1553), Benedetto Varchi’s Storia Florentina (1721), Benvenuto Cellini’s
Vita (1728), Rime e Lettere di Veronica Gambara (1759), Leopold von Ranke’s Die
römischen Päpste, ihre kirche und ihr Staat im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert
(1834-1836), Jacopo Nardi’s Istorie della Citta di Firenze (1858), and Herman Grimm’s
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Das Leben Michelangelos (1868). It is likely, though, the poet consulted yet more texts.
Longfellow in his journals records reading not just Grimm, Vasari, and Condivi’s books,
but also more contemporary works, such as John S. Harford’s 1857 The Life of Michel
Angelo Buonarroti and Anna Jameson’s 1845 Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters
(Tucker 342-43). Longfellow’s play, then, is a pastiche of the critical perspectives on the
Renaissance that by the nineteenth century had infused the literary marketplace in
England and America.
Longfellow’s faithfulness to his sources has not escaped critical notice. As a
reviewer in Lippincott’s Magazine writes, “[t]he poet seems to have followed Grimm’s
biography of the great master at every point, and in the interview at the church of San
Silvestro, he has given an actual transcription of D’Ollanda’s chronicle of the
conversation”(110). Goggio also shows Longfellow’s borrowings to be extensive,
reaching sometimes into actual quotation, and he cites a passage that is “taken almost in
its entirety from Juan de Valdés’s Alphabeto Christiano”(319). In moving through the
work, Goggio is able to attribute nearly every scene to a close historical reference. To
focus on Longfellow’s sources is to see the work as a scholarly museum-piece rather that
Fuller’s ideal of “a new product in which all the old varieties are melted into a fresh
form”(158). In this sense, the background texts of Michel Angelo point toward a view in
which artistic creation and original conception have no necessary points of overlap, and
in which pieces of history stand in for a single consolidated authorial perspective. This
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resistance to the “melting” of parts according to a writer’s creative direction is itself an
aesthetic, a means of understanding and broadcasting a particular view of artistry. 78
Early reviewers and editors of the play assumed an understanding of this aesthetic
that almost entirely negated the significance of the text. Despite being without exception
positive, not a single reviewer comments on the stylistic choices or the structure of
Longfellow’s work. The 1883 reviews in The Dial and The Spectator focus their
comments almost exclusively on the physical appearance of the book, noting the binding,
layout, paper-quality, typography, and of course illustrations, which they enumerate
individually. The publishers of the beautifully illustrated 1883 book were perhaps in part
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78
The text’s illustrations highlight its function as a cobbled museum-piece.
Images of Rome, Venice and Florence intersperse its pages, alongside of portraits of key
figures in the play and images of some of Michelangelo’s most famous statues. The
portraits, as the endnotes specify, are loosely based on historical portraits of well-known
figures in the text. Often, individual portraits of characters are merged into compositions
adapted to fit the events of the play. In the first scene, for instance, Julia and Vittoria are
pictured on a balcony in an engraving composed expressly for the volume; an earlier
picture of Julia Gonzago is based on a historical portrait. Other composite portraits
feature images of Michelangelo next to his servant; Michelangelo in the Coliseum with
Cavalieri; and Michelangelo examining a painting with Titian and Vasari. In all of these
compositions, the figure of Michelangelo is closely based on the two reproductions of
historical portraits in the frontispiece to the play. Images of Michelangelo’s work are
treated in a similar manner, as single pieces of sculpture become composite images. Near
the end of the book, a three-paneled engraving combines a line drawing of
Michelangelo’s Moses, a more fleshed-out image of Michelangelo working on his Pietà,
and a line drawing of his Madonna and Child. The title page to the second section of the
play features an engraving of what appears to be the ornate wall of an exhibition hall.
Two of Michelangelo’s statues are embedded into wall niches in the left and right of the
engraving (Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave) and the frame in the middle displays
Michelangelo’s chalk sketch of Vittoria Colonna. That these three works could never
have been displayed in this manner is highlighted by their distorted proportions: the
sketch of Colonna appears as large as the 7-foot statues. This image is not a
reconstruction, but an imaginative recreation of a fictionalized history, much like the
individual scenes of the play. The scenes function not to lay out a cohesive factual
narrative, but to assemble pieces of different narratives, presenting a collage of historical
anecdotes and perspectives in a new, never before-seen form. Longfellow’s editors, like
Longfellow himself, were tasteful “arrangers.”
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responsible for guiding this focus. The extensive list of illustrations in the volume credits
both illustrators and engravers, creating an enumeration much more detailed than the
brief table of contents. The volume also includes editorial endnotes that explicate the
various sources for the illustrations, because, as a prefatory note tells readers, “the
portraits, which form the chief subject of the notes, could not be referred to except by
recourse to a variety of works”(ix). In a text that draws on enough historical and
biographical points to merit some commentary, the singular focus on the images is
striking, and speaks to the editors’ assumptions of textual transparency.
In fact, a close-reading of Longfellow’s text pays clear dividends. Thematic
elements in the play echo the piecemeal qualities of the text’s sources, attesting to
Longfellow’s self-conscious investment in fragmentation as a trope. The play’s treatment
of its Roman setting and its central monument, the Coliseum, play into this emphasis.
Michael Angelo’s Rome is a city of ghosts and of ruins, broken not only by political
discord but also by the simple course of time. This decay suits the spirit of Michelangelo,
who, though a Florentine by birth, and initially an unwilling exile, embraces Rome in his
old age as “a second native land by predilection”(148). Ruin has everything to do with
this “predilection”: “The very weeds, that grow / Among the broken fragments of her
ruins, / Are sweeter to me than the garden flowers / Of other cities”(158). These weeds
echo the “flowers of song” in the “Dedication” that “thrust their roots among the loose
disjointed stones,” and like these flowers, the weeds both decorate the stones that they
inhabit, and push them further apart, reconfiguring the landscape as they beautify it.
Rome, like the “ruined tombs” of the “Dedication” is a living artwork, a historical
backdrop in a constant state of development.
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This setting is a fitting backdrop to the artwork that has the greatest influence on
Michelangelo’s work in the course of the play, the Coliseum. Like its setting, the
Coliseum is characterized by organic destruction and reconfiguration. It is, as
Michelangelo says on a nighttime visit to the ruins, “The marble rose of Rome! Its petals
torn / by wind and rain of thrice five hundred years; / Its mossy sheath half rent away,
and sold / To ornament our palaces and churches”(143). Yet this destruction, and the
monument’s persistence through it, represents a large part of its attraction to the artist.
Unlike his companion Cavalieri, Michelangelo does not speak of the fixed moment in its
early history “When this rose was perfect” but rather focuses on its present state (143). Its
ruin is less a sign of demise than evidence of a natural evolution, and like Giotto’s tower,
which “blossom[s]” and “bloom[s]” independently, the Coliseum is described in
strikingly organic terms. It remains, as Michelangelo says, a moss-covered rose, “Still
opening its fair bosom to the sun,” constellations lit up above “like a swarm of
bees”(143). As with Giotto’s tower, this organicism represents the object’s continuing
potential: “A thousand wild flowers bloom/ From every chink, and the birds build their
nests/ Among the ruined arches, and suggest / New thoughts of beauty to the
architect”(147). This image of wildflowers blooming from broken pieces of stone
resonates again with the image in the “Dedication” of the “flowers of song” that grow
“among the loose disjointed stones,” suggesting that Michelangelo’s aesthetic theory and
Longfellow’s own text follow the same basic principles (5).
This vision of the Coliseum as a site of fluctuating inspiration is countered by
Michelangelo’s companion Cavalieri, who sees it as defined by its early history and
association with death. For this young artist, the Coliseum is doubly static, both in its
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strictly delineated role and in its association with death. As he tells Michelangelo, “The
sand beneath our feet is saturate /With the blood of martyrs; and these rifted stones / Are
awful witnesses against a people / Whose pleasure was the pain of dying men”(144). The
Coliseum is not a site of constant aesthetic change, but a monument forever haunted by
its earliest use for gladiatorial combat. The most obvious conflict between Michelangelo
and Cavalieri lies in the former’s pure aestheticism and the latter’s moralism—
exemplified when Michelangelo exclaims that “You should have been a preacher, not a
painter!”—but this opposition is only part of the story(144). Cavalieri’s criticism of the
monument is wrapped up in his larger preoccupation with understanding both people and
sites in static terms, a tendency that also emerges in his understanding of this artist’s role.
Cavalieri understands artists as conforming to static categories, while
Michelangelo sees the artist’s development as a continuous process. The true artist, for
Michelangelo, is, like the true artwork, organic, developing through time and providing
different ideas to new generations. The initial exchange between the two men in the
Coliseum underlines this discrepancy. When Michelangelo tells Cavalieri that he comes
to the Coliseum “to learn,” the younger artist replies, “You are already master, / And
teach all other men.” Michelangelo resists this understanding by responding, “Nay, I
know nothing; / Not even my own ignorance, as some / Philosopher hath said. I am a
school-boy / Who hath not learned his lesson”(142). He later repeats this idea, calling
himself a “pupil, not a master” of the Coliseum (147). The repetition of the label “master”
here is telling: for Michelangelo, only the builder of the Coliseum, “the great master of
antiquity” merits this title, implying an association between death and static categories.
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Michelangelo’s preoccupations with death, stillness, and conclusions are tied up in this
concern with fixed categories.
In this same scene in the Coliseum, Michelangelo tells Cavalieri about his vision
of the world’s end (147). This ending, like the acquisition of the label “master,” depends
on the cessation of motion and growth:
All things must have an end; the world itself
Must have an end, as in a dream I saw it.
There came a great hand out of heaven, and touched
The earth, and stopped it in its course. The seas
Leaped, a vast cataract, into the abyss;
The forests and fields slid off, and floated
Like wooded islands in the air. The dead
Were hurled forth from the sepulchres: the living
Were mingled with them, and themselves were dead,-All being dead…(147).
Michelangelo’s dream is remarkable for its central action: destruction and death are
caused not by an active change, but by the simple absence of motion, a divine hand that
reaches to the earth and “stopped it.” This arrest causes an instant end to all life: the
ocean becomes a waterfall, the forests become wood, and the living become
indistinguishable from the dead. All is, as Michelangelo later says, a “wrack of matter.”
To this striking image of destruction, Cavalieri’s only response is, “But the earth does not
move,” highlighting both his own static world-view, and Michelangelo’s more
progressive perspective. This vision of apocalyptic fragmentation was the first that
Longfellow composed, some twenty years before the rest of the scenes were written in
the early 1870s.79 That this dream, connected to the larger unfolding of the play only
thematically, is Longfellow’s first, reveals the extent to which the trope of movement and
stasis is foundational to the play as a whole.
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79
The Writings of HWL 152. This passage is dated September 30, 1850.
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Stasis and movement likewise inform Michelangelo’s preoccupation with his
own death. The apocalyptic nature of this foundational scene echoes Michelangelo’s
anticipation of his own death, an “ending” that in fact never occurs in the course of the
play. This (at times impatient) anticipation is the central tension that drives the narrative
forward. Few scenes end without the death of a character close to Michelangelo or a
remark about Michelangelo’s own preparation for death. These preoccupations culminate
in the final scene of the play, an anti-conclusion which empties out the action of the play
rather than making sense of it. The setting is Michelangelo’s studio in the late evening,
as he is at work on a new project. When Giorgio Vasari drops in after a night of revelry,
the artist is compelled to reveal that he is carving his own tomb, and this last passage
follows:
MICHAEL ANGELO, letting fall the lamp.
Life hath become to me
An empty theatre,-- its lights extinguished,
The music silent, and the actors gone;
And I alone sit musing on the scenes
That once have been. I am so old that Death
Oft plucks me by the cloak, to come with him;
And some day, like this lamp, shall I fall down,
And my last spark of life will be extinguished.
Ah me! ah me! what darkness of despair!
So near to death, and yet so far from God!
(178)
These final lines of the play are anti-climactic, the voiding of dramatic action in the scene
neatly corresponding to the dominant metaphor of Michelangelo’s life as an empty
theater. Michelangelo’s conceit of life-as-a-theater—unlike the more traditional life-asplay—frustrates any hope for a clear conclusion to the drama’s action. The theater,
emptied of its light, music and actors, maintains still its “life” for as long as it can be
identified as a physical structure. The theater-conceit locates Michelangelo in a position
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of passive spectatorship toward his own (eventless) life, a position analogous to that of
Michael Angelo’s readers, who are by the last scenes witness to a play that has lost any
sense of dramatic action. If Michelangelo’s life is an empty theater, so too is
Longfellow’s Michael Angelo—a state which its existence as closet-drama literally
confirms.
Longfellow’s decision to end the play on this note allows both Michelangelo’s
life and the drama to continue according to the model of organic, continuous growth.
Earlier drafts of the work reveal this “unfinished” ending to be the product of extensive
reworking, the scene between Michelangelo and Vasari taking its place as the play’s last
only relatively late in the revision process. Longfellow had written a much more
conclusive final scene to the play—titled definitively “The Last Scene”—documenting
Michelangelo’s death and final words. In this scene, Michelangelo is surrounded by
friends Cavalieri, Volterra, and Asconio, as well as his doctor Donati. The four await
Leonardo da Vinci, as Michelangelo passes deliriously in and out of sleep, and dies
before this last artist arrives. The scene concludes at Michelangelo’s neatly summary last
words (“My soul to God; my body to the earth; / My worldly goods unto my next of kin/
My memory—to the keeping—of my friends”) and the ringing of the vespers (The
Writngs of HWL 406). The scene was apparently written at the suggestion of George
Washington Greene, who had listened to Longfellow’s recitation of the poem in 1872. In
a March 3, 1874 letter to Greene, Longfellow explains his editorial logic: “I have written
the new scene, that you suggested for ‘Angelo.’ I am not dissatisfied with it, and yet do
not want to add it. It seems to me better to leave the close a little vague, than to give a
tragic ending, though that may be the proper finis of the book”(5:722). The conflict here
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between what is “proper” in a general sense, and what Longfellow feels to be “better” in
terms of the particular needs of his work gives insight into his vision for the play as a
whole. Leaving the ending “a little vague,” is a way of leaving the play incomplete, as a
stylistic echo to Michelangelo’s work, which remains, until the end of his life, unfinished.
The only defiance to the self-containment of this alternative final scene is
Michelangelo’s complaint that he never finished St. Peters: “The saddest thing in dying is
to leave/ One’s work unfinished”(The Writings of HWL 405). In fact, Michelangelo
struggles throughout the play with his inability to complete his designs. The last line of
the first act records Michelangelo telling Vittoria not to look at the portrait he is painting
of her (“Not yet; it is not finished.”) while earlier in that same scene he notes that his
work on the Sistine Chapel progresses “But tardily”(69, 63). Michelangelo assumes that
even the end of a life will not bring a real conclusion to the work that will, inevitably, be
unfinished. In a conversation with Vasari and Titian in the latter’s studio, this
inconclusiveness takes on a positive turn that is reminiscent of the collaborative creation
in “Giotto’s Tower.” Speaking of a younger generation of artists with these two older
artists, Michelangelo asks, “When you two / Are gone, who is there that remains behind /
To seize the pencil falling from your fingers?”(105). Vasari and Titian’s responses are
both similarly hopeful. Vasari answers that “many hands” are prepared for the task, while
Titian responds in terms that echo both the “Dedication” and “Giotto’s Tower”: “…Our
ruins/ Will serve to build their palaces or tombs. /They will possess the world that we
think ours, /And fashion it far otherwise”(106). The reconfiguration of both artwork and
the larger world is the task of future generations, a fate that emphasizes the fluidity of
both works and worlds.
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The emphasis on incompletion and growth in Michael Angelo creates an
unusually nuanced artist, one that defies the more static and one-sided characterizations
of Emerson and Ruskin. Longfellow implicitly pits his characterization of the artist
against these opposing perspectives through the other characters within Michael Angelo,
all of whom seem to share Emersonian views of Michelangelo as a “unifier.” These
characters represent the artist as alternately as unifying all people, all artistic media, and
all artistic compositions. Vittoria Colonna, for instance, when describing Michelangelo to
Julia Gonzago in the play’s first scene exclaims that “all men” fear him, just as “all men”
honor him, and “all” should follow him. So much is he in “all men’s thoughts” that when
they speak of greatness “his name/ Is ever on their lips”(15) This vision of the world as
brought together by an identical attitude toward the great man is matched with a vision of
Michelangelo as a man who fits the different elements of his own life together
cohesively. He is, as Vittoria says, “one who works and prays, / For work is prayer, and
consecrates his life/ To the sublime ideal of his art, / Till art and life are one”(15). For
Vittoria, Michelangelo’s magnetic force brings together all men in unanimous opinion
and integrates the parts of a varied life into a seamlessly functioning whole.
This conception extends to several other characters. When Cardinal Ippolito asks
Fra Sebastiano to tell him “of the artists” a few scenes later, the painter replies in a
manner that echoes Vittoria’s description of Michelangelo. The difference between
Vittoria and Sebastiano’s characters—the one jovial and self-indulgent, the other serious
and ascetic—implicitly illustrates Vittoria’s assertion that “all men” are united in their
opinion of Michelangelo. As Fra Sebastiano says of contemporary artists:
Naming one
I name them all; for there is only one:
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His name is Messer Michael Angelo.
All art and artists of the present day
Centre in him. (35-36).
On the one hand, this passage reflects on Michelangelo’s practice of “all” the three
primary visual arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—a mastery that set him apart
from artists like Fra Sebastiano, who as he himself says is “Only a portrait-painter; one
who draws / With greater or less skill, as best he may,/ The features of a face”(36). But
this distinction also understands Michelangelo as becoming something greater in uniting
the parts of his artistry. He is, as Fra Sebastiano says, “a lover / Of all things beautiful”
while Fra Sebastiano is, in Cardinal Ippolito’s words, a “skilful hand”(37). Portraiture
and other artistic skills are located in parts—the hand, the face—but artistry is located in
the whole, in “all things beautiful.” In bringing together all of the arts, Michelangelo is
more than a skillful artisan: he becomes, as Benvenuto Cellini says later in the play, a
“miraculous Master”(149).
This distinction between artistic master and artisan dominates many of the artistic
discussions of the text, but it soon becomes apparent that Michelangelo, for all of his
monologues on the highest form of art, is ambiguous about his own place in this schema.
Michelangelo rails repeatedly against the conflation of craftsmanship and art, both as it
relates to himself and to others. In discussing oil painting with Fra Sebastiano, he rants:
When that barbarian Jan Van Eyck discovered
The use of oil in painting, he degraded
His art to a handicraft, and made it
Sign-painting, merely, for a country inn
Or a wayside wine shop. ‘Tis an art for women,
Or for such leisurely and idle people
As you, Fra Sebastiano. Nature paints not
In oils, but frescos the great dome of heaven
With sunsets, and the lovely forms of clouds
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And flying vapors. (97).
The seemingly slight distinction between the media of oil and fresco is one that
implicates the larger distinctions between art and craft, masculine and feminine, natural
and commercial. Oil painting is commercial and presumably closely representational, its
slow drying properties ideally suited to depicting the detailed and relatively diminutive
images of sign-painting. Women, and feminine men like Fra Sebastiano, appreciate these
images for their evidence of “handicraft,” or what Sebastiano calls “skill” in relation to
his own portrait painting (executed, of course, in oil). Fresco painting, on the other hand,
imitates not merely the forms of nature but its methods. As nature “frescos” the sky in
large sweeping gestures, so too does the artist cover domes of chapel ceilings, as
Michelangelo did earlier in the play when struggling to complete the Sistine Chapel
paintings. The forms of nature and the artist have no purpose but beauty; “the lovely
forms of clouds,” unlike the work of sign painting, tells no narrative and elicits no
commercial response.
Michelangelo’s association of the highest art form with nature is at the root of the
contradictions that emerge in his hierarchy of artistry. Michelangelo outlines this schema
in lofty discussions about the various merits of the arts of painting, sculpture and
architecture with several other artists in the play including Fra Sebastiano, Titian, Giorgio
Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini. Originality is, within the space of the play, the
characteristic that most defines artistry and that prompts Michelangelo’s wordy
justifications for his preference of architecture over the other visual arts. The hierarchy
that Michelangelo establishes is synthesized in a late conversation with Benvenuto:
Truly, as you say,
Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater
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To raise the dead to life than to create
Phantoms that seem to live. The most majestic
Of the three sister arts is that which builds;
The eldest of them all, to whom the others
Are but the hand-maids and the servitors,
Being but imitation, not creation.
Henceforth I dedicate myself to her. (163).
In this passage, painters and sculptors imitate the appearance of nature (with varying
degrees of success), while architects imitate its spirit, creating forms that are wholly
original. This formulation closely echoes the distinction between oil painting and fresco
painting: in both, the higher form of art imitates nature’s creative mode. The problem
built into this understanding of creativity is that the highest forms of artistic originality
are also the most craftsmanlike.
If Michelangelo had hoped to escape from “handicraft” such as Jan Van Eyck’s in
his favoring of the more “creative” arts of sculpture and architecture, the drama is clear in
showing this effort to be a failure. In working through his designs for St. Peters, for
instance, Michelangelo is confronted continuously with his subservient position toward
his patrons. At a meeting with Pope Julius III and a group of discontented Cardinals, he is
in the position of defending his plans to the men, who, as he says, “censure what they do
not comprehend”(129). When they insist on viewing the architectural designs as he
creates them, Michelangelo bristles: “I am not used to have men speak to me/ As if I
were a mason, hired to build / A garden wall, and paid on Saturdays / So much an
hour”(133). He resists viewing this commission, or any of his commissions, as efforts
that at all take into consideration the desires of the patrons, saying that their part is
merely “to provide the means” while “The designs / Must all be left to me.” In spite of
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this insistence, the artist is clearly in a position of direct accountability to his
commissioners.
Furthermore, while Michelangelo repeatedly stresses that what separates true
“mastery” from craftsmanship lies in innate knowledge as opposed to learned skill, he
himself slips in and out of this categorization. Good craftsmen can be taught—as Fra
Sebastiano has gained his “skillful hand” by training—but true artists are chosen, not
trained. As Michelangelo tells his color-grinder Urbino, “All men are not born artists, nor
will labor / E’er make them artists, but in every block of marble /I see a statue”(166).
But Michelangelo’s own self-portrayal casts doubt on this category of the “born
artist.” Michelangelo’s visits to the Coliseum in the guise of “pupil” indicate that he is far
from being above artistic influence. His artistic course has likewise been altered by his
contemporaries, as he says of Raphael: “He perchance / Caught strength from me, and I
some greater sweetness / And tenderness from his more gentle nature”(101). That
Raphael is known as much for his oil painting as for his fresco pushes this influence into
the border between “handicraft” and art. And Michelangelo’s first influence is located
even more firmly in the realm of craft. As he explains it to Urbino, his propensity toward
sculpture is (at least in part) taught rather than inborn: “I must have learned it early from
my nurse / At Setignano, the stone-mason’s wife; For the first sounds I heard were of the
chisel/ Chipping away the stone”(164). This alternate narrative of artistic development
calls into question Michelangelo’s own monologues on the hierarchy of the arts and the
sharp distinctions between “handicraft” and artistry.
Both Longfellow and Michelangelo, then, are “middle-class” and middle-brow
because they are bound by aesthetic and cultural extremes of which they are both aware.
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Like Longfellow himself, Michelangelo is trapped between the apparently contradictory
worlds of craftsmanship and fine art, a man with, in Fuller’s words, “a fancy for what is
large and manly, if not a full sympathy with it.” Michelangelo is a reflection of the
contradictions of an era that brought the first clearly enunciated distinctions between the
fine arts and crafts; Longfellow’s great accomplishment in the play lies in reshaping this
unlikely artist-figure to become an emblem for his literary craft in a way that is neither
obvious nor self-aggrandizing. While critics, since Longfellow’s earliest reviewers, have
read Michael Angelo biographically or anti-biographically, with a shifting sense of
Longfellow’s place on the spectrum of craft and fine art, acknowledging that
Michelangelo’s place on this spectrum is likewise fluid immediately complicates the
biographical equation. Michelangelo, rather than residing firmly in the category of fine
artist, in Longfellow’s account tests the boundaries between craft and art, creating a
biographical reference-point that is neither simple nor stable. If the play hinges on
implicit parallel between the life of the Renaissance artist and the nineteenth-century
author, this parallel demands that we acknowledge the complication and self-awareness
of both figures.
In collecting authors as in collecting artists, such complication is not always
welcome. As we have seen, public collections of Michelangelo as text and image develop
rapidly in both England and Italy during the nineteenth century. During the later part of
the century, Longfellow himself was also gaining status as a collectible commodity, and
as with Michelangelo’s work, narratives of meaning developed alongside of these
collections. The Longfellow Collectors’ Hand-book: A Bibliography of First Editions
(1885), first published only two years after Longfellow’s death, provides a detailed
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delineation of what is—and what is not—worth holding onto in Longfellow’s canon. It
was published by William Evarts Benjamin, a dedicated fine books dealer in New York.
The preface to the edition notes what this bibliography leaves out: Poems of Places, the
thirty-one volume anthology that Longfellow spent much of his last decade editing; any
collected editions of Longfellow’s work that do not include new writing; illustrated
editions that are not strictly first editions; and magazine and journal publications. While
these omissions are understandable in light of the bookseller’s interests, they also serve
the purpose of superimposing degrees of value onto Longfellow’s only recently compiled
canon, a creation of hierarchy that goes against Longfellow’s own crow’s eye aesthetic.
In the case of Michael Angelo, for instance, the Hand-book makes note only of the
illustrated Houghton-Mifflin edition, omitting its first magazine-publication as well as its
first complete publication (including appendix) in the Riverside edition, which arguably
qualifies as “new work.”
Longfellow’s canon was shaped through works like this Hand-Book, and the
anthologies that followed his death. We have only recently found the means of reshaping
it. The Hand-book, true to form, mentions only the physical layout of Michael Angelo,
noting that “The woodcut illustrations are numerous and beautiful”(47). The drama has
been only sparsely anthologized since the 1885 Riverside edition. The work’s collection
in volume one of the 1993 Library of America American Poetry, as well as its online
availability through Making of America hold the promise of doing to Longfellow’s canon
what Longfellow attempted to do to Michelangelo’s life: to open it up in all its conflicting
parts, to allow its contradictions to be visible rather than subsumed within a single
narrative. If anyone reads it— which seems to have always been the problem with
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Michael Angelo’s physically beautiful and seemingly shallow text—the drama can help
to unhinge notions of Longfellow’s one-sided approach to authorship. It shows him to be
a writer who, like his drama’s protagonist, confronted terms like “originality” and
“mastery” without the ultimate goal of overcoming them. This state of being, between
competing cultural storylines, is precisely what makes Longfellow and Michelangelo
both, in a literal sense of the word, “middle-class.”
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Chapter Four
“Gaze On!”: Osgood, Poe and the Visualization of Antebellum Authorship
Introduction
In the last and most exhaustive edition of her poetry that Frances Osgood was to
oversee, Poems (1850), a short four-line poem appears tucked away a quarter of the way
through the 400-plus page volume. Printed almost as an afterthought at the bottom of a
page, the simple quatrain of rhyming couplets introduces a complex intermingling of the
visual arts, poetry, and the affairs of the heart:
Gaze on! I thrill beneath thy gaze,
I drink thy spirit's potent rays;
I tremble to each kiss they give:
Great Jove! I love, and therefore live.
This poem’s emphasis on self-creation through love can easily be seen as an emblem for
a writer who proclaimed that “love-lays are my vocation.”80 But its title—“The Statue to
Pygmalion”—enmeshes the seemingly simple lines in a much larger network. By
alluding to the classical story of Pygmalion, in which the sculptor brings to life his own
creation, Osgood participates in a resurgence of nineteenth-century interest in the
narrative. Allusions to the myth are a commonplace in her canon, but rather than simply
rehashing a familiar trope, these references become a means of navigating the strange
new world of poetic publicity.
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80
Frances Sargent Osgood, “Kate Carol to Mary S.,” The Columbian Magazine
7.5 (May 1847), 207. Quoted in Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception 72.
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“The Statue to Pygmalion” is Osgood’s most explicit use of the classical
archetype, and follows many of the story’s typical outlines. The simplicity of its language
and the brevity of its form echoes early nineteenth-century representations of the
sculpture Galatea as “childlike” and “passionately pure” (Joshua 135). Osgood’s decision
to ventriloquize Galatea rather than her creator Pygmalion anticipates feminist re-writings
of the myth later in the nineteenth and twentieth century, which gave the statue a voice as
a means of subverting Galatea’s traditional passivity (xvii). The poem even has its own
direct contemporary inspiration—in Grace Greenwood’s “Pygmalion”— and prompted at
least one response poem, published in a memorial collection after Osgood’s death (The
Memorial 325). This network of poetic influence and the speaker’s direct address to the
silent Pygmalion, opens up the intimate exchange of the poem to a public space. The
“gaze” that brings Galatea to life is as much that of the reader as that of the sculptor. In
many of Osgood’s Pygmalion works, the interactions between networks of reception and
creation are even more explicit.
Osgood uses the distinctions between art and life in her Pygmalion-themed works
as a way of thinking through her own role in an increasingly public, printed literary
world. For Osgood, the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea was more than a cultural
touchstone: it was a means of interrogating the intersection of romantic intimacy and the
circulation of print. As Eliza Richards has shown, the intimate relation between women
poets and antebellum magazine publication “led the poetess to market an unlocalizable
eroticism that conflated coquetry and print proliferation”(26). Her printed flirtations,
addressed to no one in particular and everyone at once, seduced male and female readers
alike. Osgood’s writing, replete with fairy-like speakers and embodiments of poetic
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Fancy, manages to both exude sexual charm and deny any grounding in real physicality
(Richards 72). That Osgood’s biographical persona was often conflated with her childlike poetic voice highlights her paradoxical ability to exist in a rapidly expanding print
culture as an intimately familiar (but nationally-read) poetess (71-2). The myth of
Pygmalion offered a particularly potent representation of such intimacy. In the standard
telling of the narrative, the sculptor Pygmalion falls in love with his ideally beautiful
statue Galatea and, with the help of Venus, turns the statue into a woman whom he
eventually marries. Ovid’s version of the tale ends with Venus blessing the lovers’ bed
and “e’re ten Months had sharpened either Horn, / To crown their bliss, a lovely boy was
born.”81 The erotic relation between the art-object and its audience is tempered by the
traditional classicism of the tale, which renders this sexuality, like Osgood’s,
“unlocalized.” The Pygmalion narrative was one that the poetess would return to
throughout her career to consider the ways that poetic work did, and did not, come to life
for its readers. Her changing interpretation of the myth in the course of her lifetime
reflects a shift in her understanding of literary audience.
Osgood’s use of the Pygmalion trope comes into sharpest focus in “the OsgoodPoe affair” of 1845-46, a literary exchange whose falsification of public intimacy can
help us to understand the poetess’s career-long concern with audience. The exchange,
consisting of poems and stories printed by Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe in the pages of
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81
This translation is from Sir. Samuel Garth’s 1717 collection of the
Metamorphoses, one of the most popular of the early-nineteenth century editions. The
translator of this section of book ten (“The Story of Pygmalion, and the Statue”) is John
Dryden. See Norman Vance 224. Because Ovid was, as Vance writes, “nearly always
mediated” in the nineteenth century, and because such mediation is notoriously difficult
to trace, I depend in my readings on Garth’s well-known compilation of translations,
unless another source is noted (215).
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the Broadway Journal and Graham’s, hinted broadly at a romantic relationship between
the two literary acquaintances. In nearly bi-weekly installments, it offered readers—
through fairly obvious quotation, the use of transparent pseudonyms, and a tone of
romantic confidentiality—a sense of being witness to a private flirtation. But in spite of
the best critical efforts, no real evidence exists for a biographical romance between
Osgood and Poe, and Poe’s track-record as an editor and publisher suggests much more
mundane possibilities.82 The literary exchange began just as another, the so-called “Little
Longfellow War,” was ending. This earlier (and somewhat one-sided) exchange centered
on Poe’s articles and reviews accusing Henry Longfellow of various plagiarisms and
borrowings, all, some critics allege, to promote the sale of The Broadway Journal. In
fact, Poe’s stint as editor and owner of the Journal in 1845-46 was marked by a number
of such publicity schemes, including the publication of “The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar”(1845), a story that Poe framed as the eyewitness account of extended
mesmerism and gruesome death, misleading many readers before his admission of its
fictionality. The first-person address and apparent confessionality of lyric poetry, as both
Osgood and Poe were fully aware, was at least as easy to conflate with biographical
reality. In the Poe-Osgood exchange, then, the Pygmalion narrative becomes means of
representing the creation of intimacy and trust, not only between two biographical
figures, but also between their work and its audience.
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82
See for instance Kenneth Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and NeverEnding Remembrance (New York: Harper Collins, 1991) 278-293. There is little direct
documentary evidence of Poe and Osgood’s relationship. John Walsh’s 1980 Plumes in
the Dust embroiders the outlines of the Poe-Osgood affair with an obvious fascination for
the lurid details, but falls short of proving the nature of the relationship. John May’s 2004
page-turner Poe & Fanny, which imagines Poe as the father of Fanny’s third child, is a
novel that takes clear liberties in filling in historical detail.
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In the Pygmalion poems from the Poe-Osgood exchange, Osgood uses the
intimacy of the myth to reflect on the falsifications of sentiment that print culture—or at
least Poe’s sensationalist brand of print culture—encourages. The exchange, which relies
on an echoing series of Pygmalion interpretations, provides a backdrop to the changes in
Osgood’s perspective on this intimacy. The works from this period use the rewriting of
the Pygmalion myth, quotation from both Poe and Osgood’s works, and references to a
broader intertextual landscape simultaneously to create a sense of intimacy and to
question the possibility of authentic sentiment within an expanding literary sphere. This
perspective runs counter to Osgood’s earlier, more sanguine approach to the networks of
authors and readers. It also anticipates her later literary reflections back on the PoeOsgood affair, which show an increasing cynicism about the possibility of an authorreader relationship unmarked by the inconstancies of the marketplace. These later works
are failed Pygmalion narratives, centering on lifeless statues and artists railing against the
idea of audience. In their cynicism, they seem to propose a radically new conception of
artistry, one independent of the networks of reception that built up Osgood’s earlier
career. But in dismissing the exchange between audience and artwork as sentimentally
fraudulent, they paradoxically rely on allusion to the very audience-centered intimacy of
the Osgood-Poe affair. This short romantic exchange, then, haunts Osgood throughout
her career not simply because of its dubious foundation in biographical reality, but
because it represents the public posturing that she, even at the end of her life, participated
in.
This performance of intimacy bears the mark of a particular phase in antebellum
literature, when increasingly professionalized writers, both male and female, worked to
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define their shifting vocational status. Such professionalization was both the product of,
and to some extent defined by, the culture of print. The second quarter of the nineteenth
century is the period in which literary professionalization—spurred on by new
technologies of production, promotional strategies, transportation networks, and the
expansion of the literate middle classes—first became possible. As Michael Newbury,
Nicholas Bromell, and others point out, this market transition was far from seamless, and
is apparent in the work of antebellum authors in part through a concern with the text’s
mass reproducibility. Newbury, for instance, shows that critiques of popular female
writers in the antebellum period were frequently bound up in a cultural division between
craft and mechanization. Works such as Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the
Tartarus of Maids” figure female writers as a “mass of working-class factory operatives
who have no legitimate claim to the individuated imagination and autonomy of a
romantic and independent agent of creativity”(29). Though male writers fare little better
in Melville’s story, the equation of femininity and mass production was widespread, and
the concept of “fiction factories” linked to the emergent working-class literature of the
1830s extended into middle-class sentimentalism (34). The urgency with which readers
desired a personalized author-figure, even in relation to sentimental “factory fiction,” is
apparent in the public campaigns to out pseudonymous popular authors, to discover the
person—or mechanism—behind their writing.83 While Osgood and Melville are
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,&!As one newspaper article purporting to provide information on the biography of
the best-selling “Fanny Fern” begins: “Now that the thirty thousand homes have been
made brighter and happier by the introduction of Fern Leaves to their social circles, the
question: Who is FANNY FERN? and, What is FANNY FERN? appeal strongly not only
to the curiosity but the sympathies of the public.” See “Interesting to Ladies,” Pittsfield
Sun, 22 September 1853. As Lara Langer Cohen points out, the slippage here between
“who” and “what” Fern may be is significant, implying both the public’s desire for
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obviously very different authors writing for very different audiences, Osgood’s
negotiations of intertextuality, pseudonymic representation and fabricated intimacy
before and during the periodical exchange show an awareness of this sentimental factory.
Her late-life poems, meanwhile, gesture toward a more romantic view of the singular
poet, even as this is a vision that they are unable to fully commit to.
Where these analogies of authorship and mechanization had their poignancy was
in the emptiness that they implied: if female writers churned out books in the same way
that factories spat out rolls of paper, each writer was broadly interchangeable with the
other, and the notion of authorial personality was essentially a ruse. This sense was
closely tied in with the widespread antebellum representations of American literary
culture as a fraud or “humbug.” Far from unique to high-cultural sensibilities such as
Melville’s, this sense of fraudulence applied equally to writers such as Poe, for whom the
literary landscape promised economic as much as aesthetic opportunity (though it often
failed to deliver on both counts). Poe’s work, with its predilection for literary jokes,
puffery, and a maniacal obsession with plagiarism, both critiqued and participated in
what he called American literary culture as a “vast perambulating humbug.”84 Varied
antebellum accounts compare literary culture to devalued currency and land bubbles,
positioning literary culture as one of the period’s confidence games (Cohen 24-64).
Skepticism toward literary culture at large had everything to do with growing
print networks that distanced producer from consumer. The new marketplace of print
culture laid claim to both artistic and exchange value. However, artistry often maintained
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authorial personality and their suspicion that her persona may be simply a literary
production or farce. See Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature 133-135. !
84
Poe, review of The Quacks of Helicon, Graham’s Magazine 19 (August 1841),
in Essays and Reviews, 1006.
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a tense relationship with its status as product, prompting public grumbling about poetry
displayed “’mid candies, cakes, and, nuts” (Cohen 12). As Newbury puts it, “If the
promise of sales, an expanded reading public, and professional respect gave writers
something new to shoot for, it also gave them something to shoot at”(6). The very same
authors who aspired to the professionalism (and sales) of a viable marketplace, often
complained about the power that this forum held over their production.
Osgood, and poetesses in general, have not usually been implicated in the
critiques of the print marketplace that so clearly influenced and amplified the distribution
of their work. When Lawrence Buell writes that the idea of romantic authorship “started
to become a major influence in New England at the time when professionalism also
started to become a viable option”(69), he is clearly not referring to Osgood’s verse,
which seems designed for the marketplace that it encountered. Yet, as I argue, Osgood’s
Pygmalion poems show precisely the trajectory from writing for a mass audience to
(haltingly) denying it, and while her commitment to the idea of romantic authorship is
certainly incomplete, this partial shift is itself worth considering. In this chapter, I follow
the development of Osgood’s perspective on literary audience and networks through
chronological readings of several of her Pygmalion works. In the first section, I lay the
groundwork for considering the Pygmalion myth as an analogy for the coming to life of a
work (and an author) to its readers. In the second, I examine some of Osgood’s early artto-life works, and demonstrate their optimism about the strong emotive bonds between
authors, publishers, and readers. In the third, I look at Pygmalion works from the PoeOsgood periodical exchange, and show how these poems and stories construct audience
as a necessary and valuable component to the process of the artwork’s coming to life.
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And finally, I consider Osgood’s late-life attempts to distance herself from audience and
from the modes of reading that her earlier work was itself responsible for encouraging.
Throughout Osgood’s canon, the Pygmalion myth is a touchstone for her shifting
conception of artistic creation in relation to print and the networks of print. Ultimately, I
understand Osgood, and to a lesser extent Poe, as a way of creating a more textured
picture of the effects of literary publicity on both the lyric and the lyric author.
Pygmalion’s “Golden Age”
Retellings of the Pygmalion myth gained popularity during the nineteenth century,
even as Classicism more generally was on the decline. The most well-known art-centered
English-language texts from this century—The Picture of Dorian Grey, “The Oval
Portrait,” several of Hawthorne’s tales, and any number of James’s works—play with the
tenuous divide between life and art as a matter of course. This focus extends beyond the
Anglo-American experience: several critics have noted the prominence of retellings of
the myth of Pygmalion in Western tradition during this time, with Stephen Guy-Bray
declaring the period “the golden age” for such reconceptualizations (446). Prominent
writers known for their narration of the myth in some form or another include Balzac,
Zola, Rousseau, Hazlitt, Browning, Rossetti and Hardy. J. Hillis Miller, in his liberal
interpretation of the myth in Versions of Pygmalion includes Kleist, Mellville, and
Blanchot in the mix. The interest in a myth of the love between an artwork and its creator
attests at the very least to a sense of the emotional presence of inanimate images, and a
tendency to see the viewing of an artwork as a truly interpersonal exchange. It also often
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betrays an apprehension about the lifelike power of images precisely at a point when
printed imagery was becoming all but unavoidable in daily life.
J. Hillis Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion (1990) can, somewhat ironically, provide
a historical framework for Osgood and Poe’s approach to the myth. Ironically because,
as Miller himself writes in the preface to the study of the myth in various nineteenthcentury works, his book is less invested in the historical context for works than in asking
“whether writing literature, reading it, teaching it, and writing about it make anything
happen in the real historical world”(viii). But this interest in the ethics of literature
provides a framework for thinking about Pygmalion that seems particularly well-suited to
print culture. For Miller, the myth (and its various interpretations) functions primarily as
a “literalizing allegory” for prosopopoeia, the rhetorical device ascribing “a face, a name,
or a voice to the absent, the inanimate, or the dead”(3,4). In this sense, the myth becomes
a metaphor for the ‘coming to life’ of literary characters in print, and centers
fundamentally on the tenuous divide between art and life. (As Jane Miller similarly writes,
the Pygmalion myth is “a metaphor for the creative process: the artist creates a perfect
work of art which then comes to life”(206)). All literary versions of Pygmalion are,
according to Miller, meta-narratives; because the myth expresses “the personification
essential to all storytelling and storyreading,” the “characters in the story do something
like what its author, reader or critic must do in order to write, read, teach, or write about
the story.” Every Pygmalion-figure, then is both author and reader, and reflects selfconsciously on the way that literature is both composed and received.
While Miller’s study is not specifically historical in its focus, the implications of
the argument clearly are, suggesting a common thread running through the nineteenth
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century “golden age” of literary Pygmalions. In light of what critics have described as a
decline of interest in the Ovidian myths more generally, such a thread seems a valuable
necessity. If Hermann Frankel could write in 1945 that “[i]t was only in the nineteenth
century that Ovid’s prestige fell as low as it stands today,” and Norman Vance
enumerates the stumbling blocks against the Latin poet’s nineteenth-century reception as
his perceived lasciviousness, his apparent immorality, and a facile derivativeness running
counter to Romantic conceptions of poetry, it is worth asking how the narrative of
Pygmalion and Galatea escaped this condemnation (qtd in Vance 215, Vance 216-26).
My argument in this chapter is that Pygmalion’s Galatea, alternatingly distanced and
intimate, offered nineteenth century writers a means of figuring authorship.
The Pygmalion myth’s focus on the ‘coming to life’ of a work of art was an
increasingly vital issue for nineteenth-century American authors. For writers newly
invested in a publishing field that was international in scope and did reach—or at least
could reach—an audience that for the first time in history could be described as “mass,”
the public space of print and its reception was an increasingly urgent question. For
readers surrounded by increasing amounts of text and image demanding emotional
animation, the question of the art-life divide likewise became newly culturally relevant.
The Pygmalion myth may be “a metaphor for the creative process” but it is also a
metaphor for art’s reception, as the sculptor is both artist and primary audience. In this
sense, Poe, and particularly Osgood, whose work is positioned neatly between print and
performance, are excellent case studies for these concerns. Poe and Osgood’s periodical
poems show the kind of intertextual allusion that the Ovidian narrative delights in,
referring back and forth between stories and poems, quoting liberally from each other’s
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(and other writers’) works. Through quotation, they bring each other’s works to life in
new textual contexts, and create a conception of original art that depends on the
reprinting of cited phrases or passages. At the same time, Osgood’s work also delves into
the darker side of Pygmalionesque transformation, as it considers what happens in a
public landscape when works do not come to life as they were intended.
Early Osgood and the Networks of Print
Osgood’s first incorporation of the themes of the Pygmalion myth occurs not
through the outlines of the tale, but through a more generalized interest in the network of
an artwork’s creation and dissemination. In most retellings of the Pygmalion myth
(including Ovid’s) Galatea comes to life not simply through her creator’s desire, but
following his prayers to Venus. In this sense, insofar as the literal ‘coming to life’ of the
artwork references an imagined movement into life in the minds of readers, this
movement is one that the myth itself recognizes as mediated. This idea had particular
resonance in the antebellum period, as publishers gained a position of unprecedented
importance in establishing the careers of popular writers, and in bringing their works to
the public. Osgood’s career in this regard was no exception, shaped as it was through her
work with powerful publishers and editors including George Rex Graham (of Graham’s
Magazine), Rufus Griswold (who would become her and Poe’s literary executor) and
George Palmer Putnam (who published her A Letter about the Lions in 1849). From
Osgood’s earliest volume of poetry, A Wreath of Wildflowers from New England (1838)
we find that these concerns about the networks of print’s dissemination.
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In one of the most arresting poems of the collection, Osgood introduces the
division between life and art specifically in terms of print and reprinting. “On Parting for
a Time with an Infant’s Portrait,” centers on a mother sending away an image of her child
to be engraved and copied for a broader audience, and reflects equally on the
dissemination of Osgood’s own printed creations. In offering her readers a token as
sentimentalized as a child, Osgood stresses the emotional bonds between them. And in
conflating the printed child with the actual one, she invites all of her readers to share in a
piece of the work that is as authentic as her own original copy. The relation of the
processes of print to emotional ties is strikingly apparent from this poem’s first lines:
Fair image of my fairer child!
Full many a moment’s weary woe
By those blue eyes has been beguiled!
How can I let my idol go?
The framing of this image as “idol” has resonances with the Pygmalion narrative, at the
same time as it casts the child as interchangeable with its image. If idolatry is the worship
of an object as the deity that it represents, then Osgood’s labeling of the image as “idol”
counters the idea that the child is “fairer” than this picture. They are, or at least she
understands them as, one and the same. The next stanza affirms this conflation, noting
that when the infant hides her face in sleep, “Thy cherub face unchanging keeps/ Its
precious bloom and smiles for me!” The image in this sense represents the perfect
preservation of a more capricious living reality, the capture of a physical ideality not
always accessible in actual life. This simple image is not merely material, but
demonstrates, as the speaker notes later, “The soul that lightens in thy gaze.”
This material representation of “soul” prompts the speaker to address the image
directly, as if addressing her living child:
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Yet go! and with those earnest eyes,
O’ershadowed by thy silken curl,
Gaze smiling into stranger-hearts,
And bid them bless my fairy girl!
The image’s mission, in leaving her “mother,” is to inspire a similar love in “strangerhearts.” But the aim is not for the reproduction of love for its own sake, but rather to
“There plead for him who fondly wrought/ Thy soft and sunny loveliness”; that is, the
artist. The poem, in other words, centers on the sending away of an image for practical
aims: its engraving and subsequently broader dissemination. But if the painting is
conflated with the child, the engraving is also aligned with the original from which it is
reproduced. All fall under the singular second-person, a bloated “you” that encompasses
child, portrait, and every reproduced engraving.
This conflation of original and reproduction is further confused by the identity of
the image’s artist. A later edition of this poem prints the text alongside a vignette of the
Osgoods’ eldest daughter holding a butterfly on her finger, painted by Samuel Osgood.
“Him who fondly wrought” this image also wrought the child, a construction that is
doubled in the “fairy child” written into existence by the mother. In this sense, it is not
only the processes of manual and mass reproduction that are conflated, but those of
biological and technological reproduction. As Eliza Richards writes, “Poem and picture
refer to their place in a duplicative system: the couple produced the child and then
reproduced her likeness in word and image; the volume’s publication then multiplied
those replicas”(60). The butterfly in the engraving, Richards suggests, “signals
metamorphosis” from “life to art.” In the light of the Pygmalion myth, we might add,
“and back again.” This poem is, after all, at least as concerned with the manner in which
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the art object comes to life in the hands of readers, as it is with the way in which living
beings take the form of artworks.
This concern with the reader’s reception becomes clear with the speaker’s desire
that the engraving “win for him that simple meed, / For which his spirit long has pined,—
/ Th’approving glance of critic-taste.” The loving looks that the parents bestow on this
“fairer child,” then, will be returned to them not by the child herself, but by the audience
for this child’s engraving (and implicitly, the accompanying poem). The girl of the poem
is in this sense a conduit of emotion, a middleman between artist and public. For Fanny,
at least, the dissemination of the child brought the desired effect in this, its first
publication. As one of the “Notices of the Work” printed before the book’s title-page
reads, “This lady writes charmingly about babies, and we could quote sweet little lyrics
enough from her volume to render her poet laureate of those enchanting little people”(1).
The poem thus participates in a set of poetic conventions—poems about children,
poems as children—but also comments on a newer sphere in which both intimate poems
and images are multiplied as a matter of course. The most striking aspect of this poetic
commentary is its apparent lack of discomfort in sending the child into the world for the
end of gaining critical approval. The poem is, in fact, utterly unapologetic about its traffic
in children, though the sustained metaphor of the final two stanzas does offer some faint
sense of discomfort with this strange new world:
Go forth, my bird of beauty!—leave
The lowly ark of home, and when
Thy loving mission is fulfilled,
Come to my waiting heart again!
And though no promise-branch be thine,
On which faint Hope may dare to feed,
Thou’lt bring us back thine own sweet smile,
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To cheer us in our hour of need!
The oddity of imagining the home base as an “ark,” presumably equipped for animal
husbandry, underlines the importance of reproduction here. The metaphor figures the
speaker as Noah, sending out a dove in search of land, to return—or not—with a
“promise-branch” as evidence of habitable earth. This role mirrors the artistic production
of the Osgoods: Samuel’s painting, though created in England (like the child, Ellen
Osgood, that it pictured) was reproduced by the American engraver J.I. Pease at least in
part to secure his reputation in that country. Similarly, Fanny’s book of poems, while first
printed in London, was reprinted in 1841 in Boston (under the same title) and welcomed
as “a new thing under the sun” (Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review). Thus
the American poetess’s proverbial wreath of flowers did make its way back to New
England once she had firmly established herself within the publishing circles of that
country.
But even as this image of the ark is a fitting metaphor for the Osgoods’ situation,
it is also an exceedingly strange one in the context of the poem. The ambiguity of the
analogy hints at the possibility of the mother’s loss, and so underlines the generosity of
Osgood toward her readers. Putting aside even the obvious discomfort in setting one’s
own child to work in securing the family reputation, the poem betrays an impossible
scenario, a fantasy of public dissemination in which the multiple returns as singular, not
in any way diluted by the “mission” of self-multiplication. This scenario—in which the
child is both blessed by “stranger-hearts” and equally present in the mother’s “waiting
heart”—clearly resonates with Osgood’s position as a poetess of public intimacies. But
the poem ends on a note of anticipation rather than resolution. The “bird of beauty” could
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return to the ark with an olive branch of critical acclaim, or she could return with nothing
but her “own sweet smile,” or she could fail to return at all. This final scenario, though
unspoken in the poem, resonates clearly through the tale’s Biblical source, in which the
third dove’s failure to return marks Noah and his family’s approach to habitable land, and
signals their journey’s success. That the child might be conclusively lost to its parents is
the only definitive indication that it has gained a place in “stranger-hearts,” and so
Osgood’s desire for readerly acclaim is a mark of the highest sacrifice.
This willingness to exchange private bonds for public ones, dramatically
establishes artwork as a medium of emotional exchange between the parties engaged in
the creation and the reception of a work. “To George P—, Esq. On his Commissioning
the Author to purchase for him some Landscapes, by Doughty—a Summer and a Winter
Scene,” also published in A Wreath of Wild Flowers, emphasizes this bond in the
triangulated relationship between artist, patron, and public audience. The scene of the
poem is located in the space between older, more private networks of patronage, and the
newer model of print patronage, in which visual works, once purchased, could be widely
disseminated. The George P— of the title is George Putnam, Osgood’s friend and
sometime publisher, as well as publisher to the illustrated Putnam’s Magazine. That
Putnam was both a patron of original artworks and their printer is central to the poem’s
meaning, as centers on the sentimentalized bonds between artist, patron and public.
The poem stages the speaker as the intermediary in the purchase of the American
landscape painter Thomas Doughty’s works, and emphasizes the emotional bonds
between the three over any aesthetic treatment of the paintings. It opens by asserting that
the artistic value of the works is secondary to Putnam’s own appreciation, trumped by the
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memory of his generosity as patron: even if Doughty had “less proudly and well”
depicted the landscapes, “For thee they would still wear a magical grace, /…/ For the
thought of that impulse, so noble and kind, / Which prompted their purchase.” The artist,
meanwhile, is equally astounded by the patron’s generosity: “Hadst thou watch’d the
proud Artist with me, when his eyes/ Were suddenly lifted in joy and surprise, /…/ Thou
wouldst bless heaven’s goodness for giving thee power / To soothe for the lonely, one
sorrowful hour!” And the speaker, charged with the “pleasant behest” of communicating
the sale is also affected and “full of childlike emotion.”
George Putnam’s history as patron suggests that the sentimentalized scene of this
purchase takes place between old and new models of arts and literary commissions. The
poem precedes an encounter from 1845, when Putnam reluctantly agreed to loan Doughty
$30, taking as collateral several of his works. “To George P—“ implies that 1845 may
not have been the first time that such an exchange took place, while Doughty’s financial
desperation in the later anecdote suggests some additional meaning for the extremity of
the artist’s “joy and surprise” in Osgood’s work. The poem, in other words, highlights the
awkward position of the artist (or author) at this point in publishing history, when
networks of sale fell somewhere between the professional and the personal. The 1845
anecdote offers clear substantiation for Leon Jackson’s claim that multiple economies—
including gift and loan economies—were at work behind the publication of antebellum
works: when Putnam sold two of the three paintings to the American Art Union for $50,
Doughty alleged that this move not only compromised his reputation by underselling the
work, but violated the terms of their agreement. In this imperfectly “professionalized”
world, the artist’s loan was the publisher’s sale, and the confusion of these categories
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demonstrates clearly that much more was at stake in these networks than the circulation
of money. The poem’s titulary dedication to this publisher is further evidence that these
ambiguous relationships extended to literature. (Greenspan 184-5 n4).
Putnam’s role as a publisher and strong advocate for international copyright gives
“To George P—, Esq.” resonance in terms of the reprinting of text and image, and
positions the speaker as a stand-in for a broader reading public. As Osgood’s
contemporaries would have known, publishers such as Putnam routinely purchased
original artworks, not just for cultural capital, but for the practical aim of having the
image engraved and reprinted in their publications. (The engraver would be paid for his
work each time he created a new plate, but the artist would general only be paid at the
purchase of the original image, or not at all, if the image was on loan (Patterson 21-22)).
Though Putnam did not use the Doughty landscapes in any of his volumes, in this poem
about the reproduction of emotion between members of an artistic network, reproduction
of a more prosaic kind lurks just beneath the surface. And in the absence of a physical
print, the speaker works to transmit these works—or at least their most elements, the
emotional bonds that they create—to readers of the poem.
Both “On Parting” and “To George P—,” then, consider not just the artwork’s
effect on a single speaker, but this work’s existence within a complex network of
sentimental and economic exchange. These works are destined from their inception for
public consumption, and yet are on these grounds no less personal. Even in Osgood’s
early work, the image and text both are considered in the context of the social bonds for
which she is today largely known. These poems, though they do not deal explicitly with
the Pygmalion myth, anticipate some of the concerns in Osgood’s later work centering on
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this symbol, including the tenuous divide between life and art, and the social networks
that create the public text.
This early volume, then, anticipates the concerns about the divide between private
and public, life and art, which would come to dominate the poems of Osgood’s exchange
with Poe in the mid-forties. Osgood was clearly conscious early on of the potential for
imagery and text to create personal ties even as they circulated in seemingly impersonal
forms, their ability to, through their reproduction, replicate of the emotional bonds that
created them. This was the careful idealism of Osgood’s early work: to see the girl and
her engraving as both distinct and identical, to see a painting as defined only by its easily
transmissible sentimental bonds. This dichotomy is problematized in Osgood’s periodical
poems and stories from the mid-1840s on, which take on sight through the story of
Pygmalion, and unlike Osgood’s earlier work approach the threat of idolatry and selfinfatuation which had long haunted retellings of the myth. If earlier poems construct the
division between life and art as negligible, the works of the Poe-Osgood exchange
examine this divide with a more critical eye, finding in this juncture a real potential for
danger. At the same time, the biographical history of the literary exchange worked in
precisely the opposite way, blurring the divide between life and art, and causing much of
New York’s literary world to feel that Osgood and Poe meant what they said in the
poems that they published in The Broadway Journal and Graham’s. Thus this
Pygmalion-work is a part of the larger dialogue between two writers, but it also suggests,
at a time when Osgood’s own text circulated with increasing rapidity, that a work’s
audience was not always “full of childlike emotion.”
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The “Osgood-Poe Affair”
In late February 1845, Poe spoke at the New York Historical Society, in an event
that has gone down in history primarily for being his first public reading of “The Raven.”
But the ostensible purpose for the evening came earlier, when Poe entertained the
audience with the talk “The Poets and Poetry of America,” a largely critical examination
of the day’s literary stars. As Meredith Mcgill has shown, the talk inspired the admiration
of the literary side of the nationalistic Young America movement, particularly that of
publisher Evert Duyckinck, who embraced Poe for his discriminating eye toward the field
of mass publication. Like others in the movement, Duyckinck was suspect of the
periodical press based on its unscrupulous dissemination of foreign reprints and “mean”
American writing alongside the work of “good writers”(qtd. in Mcgill 202). Poe’s
lecture, McGill argues, was thus useful in making severe judgments of quality, and in
making distinctions that were not readily apparent in the dangerously democratic field of
magazine publishing. Duyckink’s review of the talk emphasizes these points: “In the
exordium [Poe] gave a great and cutting description of the arts which are practised, with
the aid of the periodical press, in obtaining unmerited reputation for literary worth” (qtd.
in Mcgill 207). One of the few writers of the popular press who Poe singled out for praise
rather than criticism was Fanny Osgood.
Of poets and poetesses including William Cullen Bryant, Henry Longfellow,
Henry Dana, Lydia Sigourney, Amelia Welby, and the Davidson sisters, Osgood was the
only one who inspired unconditional praise. The terms and the means of this praise
strikingly anticipate the central concerns of the two authors’ later literary exchange. Poe
praised Osgood for technical skill, grace, and, not least, originality (Walsh 6-7). This last
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term was a loaded one in a lecture devoted to separating the legitimately literary from the
“puffery” of the periodical press. According to Osgood’s own letters, Poe also “recited a
long poem” of hers prior to his reading of “The Raven” (Silverman 286); this juncture of
originality and quotation, in the conceptive moment of their relationship, sets the stage
perfectly for their literary exchange. After their first meeting some weeks later,
engineered by mutual friend Nathaniel Willis, the two would conduct an intimate
friendship that left its primary historical record in the form of poems that they published
in The Broadway Journal and Graham’s Magazine in 1845. These works, when read as a
group, trace the general outline of illicit love. But they also center strikingly on the
question of originality and quotation, and the place that quotation has in an artwork’s
coming to life for readers.
The conjunction of romance and artistic originality comes to play most
prominently through the Pygmalion myth. The Pygmalion-Galatea story is reinterpreted
in both well-known and lesser-known works of the exchange and performs two important
functions for the writers. On the one hand, it very literally expresses a culturallyforbidden love that is initiated through the gaze: precisely the kind of public, distanced
and troubled romance that Poe and Osgood appeared to act out. At the same time, it is
also a narrative that, even in its early forms, picks up on the artistic issues of origination.
Galatea is brought to life because the uniqueness of her form demands it. Sculpted from
an ideal rather than an actual woman, Galatea inspires Pygmalion’s love for the ways in
which she is distinct from the mortal women that he disdains. Many versions of the story,
though, including Ovid’s, show Pygmalion praying not that the statue should come to
life, but that he find a wife that mirrors the statue. When he instead receives the original
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living statue rather than a copied statuesque being, Venus is responsible for this
interpretation of the transformation.
This intersection of romance and a consideration of the nature of originality
makes this story almost ideally suited to self-reflexive retellings within the periodical
press. The romantic and apparently secretive nature of the works in the literary exchange
between Poe and Osgood seems designed to sell journals—as it perhaps was. The works
in the exchange that depend on the Pygmalion narrative only heighten this sense of
scandal, associated as this story traditionally is with idolatry and incest. The narrative’s
simultaneous association with concerns of artistic origination means that it participates in
the other debates that raged in American journals during the 1840s, debates centered on
the development of copyright laws, as well as the nature of artistic originality in an age of
mass reprinting and wholesale quotation. In fact, the works of the Poe-Osgood exchange
overlapped with the last letters printed from the “Little Longfellow War,” a public debate
that was located precisely at this intersection of scandal-mongering and genuine
intellectual debate.
The Pygmalion poems of the Poe-Osgood exchange, then, not only appear in the
press, but they are in a very real sense about the press and the relation to audience that it
enables. The exchange could clearly only have taken place given Poe and Osgood’s close
association with the Broadway Journal and Graham’s, and it can only be considered an
exchange at all because of the intertextual quotation and repetition within their works.
The understanding of authorship that emerges from these works depends intimately on
the networks of print, presenting an emotional intimacy that seems immediately legible,
but that depends closely on the construction of what came before. This intertextuality is
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represented as creative act: unlike the mechanized and wholesale reprinting that Poe
critiqued in his advocacy for copyright laws, the selected copying and recopying of their
works was a dynamic process that brought new meaning to the words for both authors
and readers. And readers in these works are summoned as necessary witnesses to the
coming to life of stories, poems and artworks.
The April 5, 1857 issue of the Broadway Journal includes several early entries
from the exchange, but begins with an entry from the end of another famous (and
contentious) literary exchange, the terms of which provide a framework for thinking
about Poe and Osgood’s works during this time. Poe’s preoccupation with plagiarism as
Newbury has noted, is intimately tied up with his advocacy for strengthened copyright
laws that ensure an author’s recompense at his text’s reproduction. It is not surprising
then, that this issue of the journal begins on the front page with Poe’s last textual entry
into what would become known as the “Little Longfellow War,” the periodical exchange
that was initiated in January 1845 when Poe accused Henry Longfellow of plagiarism in
his review of The Waif. In the article in this issue, “Plagiarism—Imitation—Postscript to
Mr. Poe’s Reply to the Letter of Outis,” Poe responds to a letter from the pseudonymous
“Outis,” recently published in the Broadway Journal, in which the author accuses Poe of
the same literary plagiarisms which Poe had earlier leveled against Longfellow. (That
Poe is widely believed to have not only published but authored the “Outis” letters in an
effort to increase his journal’s sales only complicates the issue of authorship). In this
open letter, Poe denies that there was any malice behind his original accusations, and
concludes by saying that “for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search
the works of the most eminent poets”(212). Poe strikingly frames these “plagiarisms” in
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terms of biological conception. Ideas culled from another author, he writes, may lie
dormant in the poet’s consciousness, and then through association, will “spring up with
the vigor of a new birth—its absolute originality [...] not even a matter or
suspicion”(212).
This last entry, then, justifies literary borrowing through an analogy of artistic
creation that recalls Osgood’s self-replicating child in “On Parting with an Infant’s
Portrait.” For both Osgood and Poe, the processes of biological reproduction and the
dissemination of printed matter are aligned. While there are clear differences between
how Poe and Osgood use reproduction in these works—most particularly, that Poe is
concerned with the reinterpretation of work while Osgood centers more exclusively its
dissemination and reception—that both rely on this trope for considering the encounter
with a text can tell us something about how they envision the act of reading images and
text. For both writers, the encounter with a publication is a dynamic one; you are likely,
as Poe puts it, to be “possessed by another’s thought”(212). The literary text becomes a
living being, capable of taking control of your thought, or in the case of Osgood’s poem,
relaying words of praise from audience to artist. This concept of dynamic possession
finds a place for selective literary quotation apart from the unauthorized—and
mechanized— reprinting of works that Poe would continue to rally against in the journal.
Such “possession” is the centering trope of “The Rivulet’s Dream,” a short
allegory of failed love that appears some pages later in the same edition of the Broadway
Journal. The poem is both an example of Osgood’s dynamic use of quotation, and the
way that audience gets introduced, often explicitly, into the Pygmalion works of the PoeOsgood exchange. As Osgood’s first contribution to the literary exchange, the poem
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hides behind layers of confused authorship: it is subtitled enigmatically as “From the
German of—Somebody” but published in the “Original Poetry” section of the journal
under one of Osgood’s pseudonyms, Kate Carol. This pseudonym was so generally
known that it reveals rather than conceals identity, and like the guise of translation in the
subtitle, is a half-hearted attempt at literary distancing that fails almost immediately. Poe
makes this thin disguise all the more apparent by gesturing toward it, and in so doing,
points out both his and Osgood’s awareness of their audience. As Poe’s editorial
introduction recounts: “We might guess who is the fair author of the following lines,
which have been sent us in a MS. evidently disguised—but we are not satisfied with
guessing, and would give the world to know.” Though was follows is an somewhat
innocuous poem about a stream’s love for the star that reflects itself in her surface, Poe’s
frame introduces into the Pygmalion narrative both himself, and the gaze of spectators.
While the stream, then fails to convince her love-object to “dwell with me”—once
daylight comes, the reflection disappears—Poe’s knowing aside to reader’s facilitates
another kind of coming to life, a biographical reading of the work.
Such a biographical move is even easier to make through the quotations of
another failed Pygmalion poem in the same edition of the Broadway Journal. Osgood’s
“So Let It Be,” which appears on the following pages of this same edition of the
Broadway Journal. Subtitled “To—,” the poem centers on the speaker’s relationship to
one who is “bound by nearer ties.” The narrative of unrequited love here is told, as in
“The Rivulet’s Dream,” by contrasting the speaker’s animation to the love object’s
unresponsiveness: the speaker “vainly strive[s] to hide” her “grief” while the love-object
is unexpressive, untouched by “The shade that feeling should have cast,” looking on with
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“serene and silent eyes” and speaking in a “heartless tone.” The inhuman immobility of
the love-object casts him as a marmoreal Galatea-figure, who resists coming to life even
in the face of his lover’s animation. At the same time, the poem brings to life one of
Poe’s earlier stories, through the title and echoing refrain “So Let It Be.” This refrain—
framed in the title with quotation marks and elsewhere with italics—is a direct citation
from Poe’s story of ill-fated romance, “The Visionary,” first printed in Godey’s Lady’s
Book in June 1833, then later in 1840 in The Southern Literary Messenger, and then
finally, in June of 1845 in the Broadway Journal.85
Osgood’s borrowing from this particular tale does more than just flag a
connection between the writers: it shows her own investment in the Pygmalion narrative
as a means of considering audience, and specifically the function of audience within the
Poe-Osgood exchange. The poem centers on the death-pact between two secret lovers, a
pact declared by the exclamation, “so let it be!” And like Osgood’s poem, it also contains
thematic references to the Pygmalion narrative, albeit in a modified form. The outlines of
the Pygmalion-narrative enter into “The Visionary” through the descriptions the
Marchesa Aphrodite, whose head is described as “classical,” her form “statue-like.”
When she encounters her lover, the story’s protagonist, her physical transformation
echoes that of Galatea, down to her blush: “the entire woman thrills throughout the soul,
and the statue has started into life! The pallor of the marble countenance, the swelling of
the marble bosom, the very purity of the marble feet, we behold suddenly flushed with a
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85
This final reprinting during the literary exchange seems to signal Poe’s
awareness of Osgood’s quotation, and does his re-titling of the work as “The Assignation,”
echoing a poem of the same title in Osgood’s collection The Poetry of Flowers and the
Flowers of Poetry (1841).
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tide of ungovernable crimson”(358). As in Ovid’s version of the tale, her coloring is a
sign of her awakening to life, as well as her love for the one who has awakened her.
These clear allusions to the traditional outlines of the Pygmalion narrative are
complicated by the story’s culmination in a death-pact, and its conspicuous summoning
of an audience. The story’s ending not only transforms the Marchesa and her lover into
art-objects, but it does so in the presence of the narrator, a stand-in for readers who
suggests a motive for Osgood’s interest in the tale. This anonymous narrator is an
acquaintance of the young lover (also unnamed), and is summoned to the lover’s home
on what turns out to be the morning of the death-pact. The invitation is a privileged one:
the lover’s home is a palace, and contains a collection of rare paintings, sculpture and
design that he has kept carefully guarded from the public eye. As he declares to the
narrator, “you are the only human being, besides myself, who has ever set foot inside [the
palace’s] imperial precincts.” The rich collection of art-objects, particularly a painting of
the Marchesa as an angel with “delicately imagined wings”(260) anticipates the
transformation of the lovers themselves. And the narrative, in citing Chapman—
“He is up/ There like a Roman statue! He will stand/ Till Death hath made him
marble!”—makes the connection between art and death explicit. This connection
suggests Osgood’s motives in citing the tale early in the periodical exchange. The reason
for the narrator’s invitation as witness to the lover’s pact is an unexplained fact of the
narrative, that in the context of the Poe-Osgood exchange furnishes a useful analogy for
the reading audience. Like the narrator of “The Visionary,” Poe and Osgood’s readers in
the Broadway Journal and Graham’s become privileged spectators to, not a love affair,
but the transformation of two biographical figures into works of art.
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Two other Pygmalion-themed stories of the periodical exchange also set up
Osgood and Poe’s (complicit) expectations of audience. They are thematically
entwined—an early edition of Poe’s story seems to have inspired Osgood’s, while lines
from Osgood’s narrative found their way into Poe’s revised edition—and though
drastically different in tone, reflect a similar perspective on their expectations for
audience. Osgood’s story, “Florence Errington,” published in the early part of the
exchange in Graham’s, seems most directly to instruct readers in how to approach her
work. Subtitled “An O’er True Tale,” the story demands a biographical reading even
more insistently than most of Osgood’s stories, but its frame-narrative suggests that such
a reading is untrustworthy. It centers on a narrator called Fanny, and a main character
called Florence, Fanny’s juvenile pen-name (The Memorial 15). This story, published
around the time of Poe’s New York Historical Society lecture, opens with Fanny
imploring an “Anna” (the name of Osgood’s sister) to “do something ridiculous, or
pathetic, or sublime, and furnish me material for a story!”(54)—a story, the narrative tells
us, to be printed in Graham’s. When Anna fails at the task, another friend furnishes the
narrative of Florence Errington for the “poor, storyless author”(54). The frame for this
narrative sets readers up for ridicule, pathos, or sublimity, all in the service of periodical
publication, but certainly not for literal truth.
Given that the central story is—like so many of Osgood’s versions of the myth—a
failed Pygamalion narrative, it offers some insight into the skepticism that with which we
might well approach Osgood’s works in the periodical exchange. It centers on the
unhappy union of Florence, “the most delicate, ethereal creature”(54), and a man of a
more “worldly” temperament. Florence is compared throughout the narrative to an art
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object in terms that recall Galatea: she is “as lovely a picture as the painter or poet ever
conceived,” “prone to “a quick vivid blush would burn and fade in her pure cheek”(54).
The story culminates in a moment of romantic mortification that brings a transition from
life to art-object. When she is asked to act out a tableau vivant at a party immediately
after her husband’s mistress, the knowing gaze of the audience is too much for her: “so
motionless, so statue-like she seemed! Not a breath—not a sigh! It was too perfect!
almost painfully so”(56). The performance ends as Florence’s husband rushes toward her
and discovers her lifelessness: “She was dead! Life had left her even as she stood ‘the
observed of all observers!’”(56). The stern moral of the tale—the deadening effects of
worldly society on “delicate” spirits—is clearly at odds with the lightheartedly worldly
purpose that the narrative performs within the frame narrative. In this unlikely
conjunction, Osgood provides a means of reading the serious moral tone of her
Pygmalion works—within the context of periodical demands and deadlines. Fittingly,
when the tale was reprinted the next month in The Green Mountain Gem—presumably
without Osgood’s permission, as her name was removed from the byline—its inclusion in
the “Moral Tales” category was made possible by the removal of the frame narrative.
The cross influences between “Fanny Errington” and Poe’s story “Life in Death,”
drives home the central similarities of the works, particularly in regards to their
profoundly amoral perspectives on audience. “Life in Death,” published in Graham’s in
April of 1842, at a time when Osgood was a regular contributor and Poe was in his last
months as editor, is, like “Fanny Errington,” a frame-narrative that centers on the undoing
of Galatea’s movement into life. “Life in Death” may have inspired the general outlines
of Osgood’s tale, and it is almost certain that “Fanny Errington” in turn influenced Poe’s
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revision of “Life in Death” and its publication as “The Oval Portrait” during the
periodical exchange. And these connection can help to highlight the commentary of both
works on audience. If “Fanny Errington” hints at the market motives that underline even
the creation of “moral tales,” then Poe’s story suggests that an audience’s reaction to any
work has little to do with truth or morality, but relies simply on an effect of
“lifelikeness,” and a bringing to life of the audience.
“Life in Death,” and its later revision, “The Oval Portrait,” are usually read as
principally concerned with “the nature of art and its perplexed relationship with the life it
copies, alters, or transcends”(Freedman 7). According to this framework, the tale seems
to suggest that artistic greatness “comes at mortal cost to the human subjects the artist
reduces to the disposable raw materials of an alchemical art” (8). To look at the tale in the
context of the Pygmalion narrative and artistic reprinting can complicate this analysis.
When read in the context of Pygmalionesque language and the concerns with art’s
dissemination that follow this myth in Osgood and Poe’ s writing, it becomes apparent
that the story is as concerned with the effect of an artwork on its artist and audience as on
its subject. Thus while the subject of the artwork does suffer a “mortal cost” from the
creation of the work, the artist and the narrator-audience go through a transformation that
echoes the subject’s own. In this sense, the story not only documents the creation of a
copy of life, but re-creates this copy in the minds of the artist, the narrator, and ultimately
the readers of Poe’s tale. To be affected by a work, Poe’s narrative emphasizes, is to
believe that it is real.
The narrative’s first reference to the Pygmalion myth emphasizes the effect of a
work of art’s “lifelikeness” on its audience. The narrator, “desperately wounded” and
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heavily drugged, has taken refuge for in an abandoned chateau for the night, and is falling
into a dream-like state when an adjustment of the candelabra brings a portrait of a young
girl into sight. The sight of this painting has an immediate enlivening effect on the
viewer: “the first flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to dissipate the
dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses, and to startle me into waking life as if
with the shock of a galvanic battery”(201). This initial sight has the effect of prompting
the narrator’s return to life, but further consideration of the work brings about a reversal
of this effect. After studying “for some hours perhaps” the nature of the painting’s
striking effect, he ultimately concludes: “I had found the spell of the picture in a perfect
life-likeness of expression, which at first startling, finally confounded, subdued and
appalled me”(201) To appall is both an emotional and physical descriptor, denoting
horrification and connoting the associated physical effect of pallor. As Paula Kot notes,
Poe’s use of this adjective in the narrative is both recurrent and significant (4).
Pallor describes not only of the narrator’s transformation, but also the artist’s and
the female subject’s, tying the three in to a shared experience. The transformation is most
obvious in the case of the subject of the painting, who in the course of her sitting moves
from being “all light and smiles and frolicksome as the young fawn,” to “pin[ing]
visibly,” and eventually dying at the portrait’s completion. The deterioration of the
subject’s health is linked explicitly to her coloring, as “the tints which [the painter]
spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him”(201).
Though the canvas gains “tints” on its formerly “pale” surface, the artist responsible for
the portrait goes through a transformation in the process of his creation that echoes that of
his sitter. The work renders him “passionate, and wild, and moody”; he “took a fervid and
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burning pleasure in his task.” This “burning” echoes the initial enlivening blush of
Galatea, but is short-lived. On first seeing his completed portrait, the artist becomes
“tremulous, and pallid, and aghast”(201). As the sitter’s husband, he is a Pygmalionfigure who echoes the coming to life of his artwork, and also ultimately this movement’s
reversal.
The broad application of this progression from animation to petrification suggests
that more is at work than a moral about the male artist’s objectification of his female
subject (as Leland Person suggests) or about the creative process more generally as
vampiric (as Mario Praz and James Twitchell argue). The echoing of the reverse
Pygmalion narrative through the figures of artist, audience and subject suggests that the
experience of art—from any perspective—brings about a transformation from life into art
object. The art object thus circulates not in its material form but as an effect—
lifelikeness—that copies itself and ‘comes to life’ through its audience. If the abandoned
chateau—both the site for art’s creation, and the site for its experience—is modeled as a
private, even secluded space, it is also the intensely public space of art’s reproduction.
Poe’s dissemination of the tale in Graham’s is the culmination of the narrator’s
“appalled” state; in becoming and producing an artwork, this narrator submits to
reproducing the same process of enlivening and deadening in the readers who will
encounter “Life in Death.” The experience of art in this context, then, is both creative and
deadening, private and public, endlessly copied and endlessly original. The tale, rather
than purporting to judge the apparent dangers or morality of artistic representation, is
profoundly amoral, demonstrating the realities of the public/private text as the world of
print disseminated it. This is a world in which art is both plentiful and unoriginal: even
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the inspired image at the center of the story depends for its beauty on what it takes from
its subject.
The cross-pollination of ideas between “Life in Death” and “Fanny Errington” is
marked. That the impression which circulates in Poe’s tale is one of “lifelikeness” has
clear application to the works of the periodical exchange, which capitalize on their
connections to biography for the effects that they had on readers. This relevance may
have attracted Osgood to the tale in her own reverse-Pygmalion narrative. Meanwhile,
Poe’s changes to “Life in Death” and its republication as “The Oval Portrait” in the
course of the periodical exchange indicate the influence of “Florence Errington.” When
Poe published “The Oval Portrait” in April 1845, it appeared in print just two months
after Osgood had published her story in Graham’s—and just one month after Poe had
announced in the editor’s column of the Broadway Journal that this journal would
publish a monthly review of the contents of Graham’s. It is almost certain, then, that Poe
came across the story. His revisions to “The Oval Portrait” suggest the same: this later
version of the tale ends abruptly as the painter “turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—
She was dead”(265). This last italicized “She was dead”—“who was dead” in the original
story—echoes an identical line in the last passage of “Fanny Errington.” The thematic
connection between the two tales is even stronger. Poe would undoubtedly have found
resonance in a narrative that questions the reading of truth (or “o’er truth”) into fiction,
just as his tale isolates “lifelikeness” as a quality that does not have privileged access in
life itself, but that circulates freely between subjects, artists, and audiences.86
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86
The revision of Poe’s story appears in the Broadway Journal just two issues
after his article “Anastatic Printing,” a short but significant piece that comments on the
new printing process by which, Poe believed “the ordinary process of stereotyping will be
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Osgood’s later work confronts the idolatry of the Pygmalion narrative with
increasing skepticism. The literary exchange between Poe and Osgood peters out toward
the end of 1845, but Osgood continues to compose and publish Pygmalion-themes poems
that recall the outlines of the affair, as well as the exchange’s investment in the sphere of
print. While early works celebrate the public exchange of print, and works from the
periodical exchange with Poe see audience as essential to the performances of artistry,
Osgood’s later poetry strikes a tone that is much more unambiguously critical, and calls
up the Pygmalion myth for a discussion of a public literary sphere from which the poetess
increasingly sought to separate herself. The poetry of the final years of her life reveals a
shifting formulation of artistry, one that distanced itself from quotation and the
circulation of a public intimacy, emphasizing instead a more private artist-figure.
Pygmalion’s Retrospective
Osgood’s use of the Pygmalion trope following the 1845 periodical exchange
develops in a manner that reflects her representation of Poe as a poetic and biographic
figure, as well as her own changing conception of the print sphere. In several narrative
poems from 1848-9, all published in Graham’s as so much of Osgood’s work, Osgood
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abolished”(230). The process of anastatic printing relied on the application of acid to a
sheet of text or image; the acid would be neutralized by the ink but not by the paper, so
when pressed against e a zinc plate, would create a stereotype plate. In this manner “any
engraving, or any pen and ink drawing, or any MS., can be stereotyped” cutting out the
printer and putting the means of print reproduction directly in the hands of the author.
Poe images a situation in the not-to-distant future, in which “authors will perceive the
immense advantage of giving their own MSS. directly to the public without the
expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous interference of the
publisher”(230). This era of self-publication would have to wait longer than Poe
anticipated—anastatic printing failed to take off, in part because its frequently destructive
effect on the acid-soaked original—but ties in strikingly to the free circulation of
artworks in “The Oval Portrait.”
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confronts the Pygmalion myth from a new perspective, intertwining it with the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice. In Ovid’s version of the myths, both stories appear in Book X of
The Metamorphoses, and so, as the other tales that appear within this Book, are
conceptually linked; for Osgood, this link takes on significance as a means of contrasting
aurality with a more visual world of print. These late Pygmalion poems are striking for
the way that they give the female Galatea-figure voice, in direct opposition to most other
retellings of the myth during this (or indeed any) time-period. This voicing is a central
component in these longer pieces, but more is at work here than a feminist re-imagination
of the narrative. This voice is also means of stressing aurality over the image of the
traditional Pygmalion myths. In granting these characters voice, Osgood emphasizes their
ability to restructure the traditional moral confines of the stories in which they find
themselves. If the ‘coming into life’ of the Pygmalion narrative is in Osgood’s earlier
work a symbol for the intimate relationship of public print, this progression has, in these
late poems, shut down entirely. These pieces are populated instead with statues that fail to
come to life, false idols, and unrequited love. But Osgood’s later works enact an
alternative version of this coming to life, in which the speakers determine their own fates
through transformative words rather than a transformative physicality. In taking this
control, they distance themselves from the public intimacy which Osgood’s earlier lyrics
held out as a promise, withdrawing instead into a private space that increasingly came to
characterize Osgood’s later work. For this analysis, I center especially on the late
Pygmalion poem “Eurydice,” and her final collection, Poems (1850).87
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87
The entwining of allusions to Poe, Orpheus, and Pygmalion is also seen in other
late poems such as “Fragments of an Unfinished Story,” an unusually long narrative
poem in blank verse, published in the November 1849 edition of Graham’s. Griswold
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In “Eurydice,” a poem published only a few months after Poe’s death, in the May
1848 Graham’s Magazine, Osgood picks up both myths in a work that likewise resonates
clearly with Poe’s own. Opening with a frame narrative that, like “The Oval Portrait,”
introduces the central narrative as a re-telling of a written text, the speaker presents
herself as “reading o’er that antique story, / Wherein the youth half human, half divine, /
Of all love-lore the Eidolon and glory/ …/In Pluto’s palace swept, for love, his golden
shell!” The language of this frame clearly echoes that of some of Poe’s most well-known
works, in particular “The Raven” and “Dream-land.” The story that the speaker reads, the
myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, likewise has resonances with Poe’s representation within
Osgood’s canon; Osgood’s most well-known late work, “The Hand that Swept the
Sounding Lyre,” uses language from Poe’s verse to represent the deceased poet as an
Orpheus figure. Though these references call to mind the periodical exchange with Poe,
Osgood’s perspective on audience in this late poem has clearly shifted from those earlier
works.
Osgood’s version of the Orpheus tale in “Eurydice” emphasizes the connections
between this myth and that of Pygmalion, interweaving the two in a way that exaggerates
the dormant connections within Ovid’s own telling. But in so doing, the figure of
audience becomes a threat to life rather than means of creating it. Osgood’s use of
language emphasizes the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as a prefiguring (and
condensation) of the theme of coming to life that resurfaces in the story of Pygmalion and
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mentions this poem in his biographical sketch of Osgood in The Memorial (1851)
immediately after his description of “Ermengarde’s Awakening” and “Eurydice.” Of
these latter two poems, he writes that they are “upon a similar subject, and in the same
rhythm”(23). Considering that the works are not explicitly on the same subject at all, it
seems that Griswold was well aware of the conceptual links between “Ermengarde’s
Awakening,” “Eurydice,” and “Fragments from an Unfinished Story.”
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Galatea—and that is undone by the deaths of the later stories of Venus and Adonis and
Myrrha and Cinryas. The story of Orpheus centers on several movements from death to
life, but the overall arc of the tale falls in direct opposition of that of Pygmalion and
Galatea: Eurydice dies, as the speaker says, “because beloved too well!” Osgood’s
retelling elides Eurydice’s first death, from a snake-bite on her wedding day, and moves
directly into Orpheus’s descent into Hades and his efforts to rescue his wife. The
language of this scene immediately brings the Pygmalion-narrative to mind: Eurydice is
Orpheus’s “idol blest,” and as he enters the underworld, playing his lyre, she “drink[s]
life from his dear gaze” and “the life of life regain[s].” The music has the opposite effect
on the other inhabitants of Hades, who are “charmed into statues by thy God-taught
strain.” While several translations of Ovid use the word “charm” to describe Orpheus’s
effect on the inhabitants of the underworld, the idea of being turned into statues, and as
Osgood writes later in the same passage, “fettered,” is her own emendation (MigraineGeorge 239).
In entwining elements of the Pygmalion narrative with her version of Orpheus and
Eurydice’s story, Osgood emphasizes the contest between aurality and sight that is more
understated in traditional versions of the myth. This contest begins with the speaker’s
own experience of the myth; she enters the tale from the print of an “antique story,” and
from this space, projects her imagination of the scene in terms that are exclusively visual:
I see thy meek, fair form dawn through that lurid night!
I see the glorious boy—his dark locks wreathing
Wildly the wan and spiritual brow
…
I see him bend on thee that eloquent glance
The while those wondrous notes the realm of terror trance!
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A spectator to Orpheus’s “eloquent glance,” the speaker retells the myth to reveal a
version of the narrative in which Orpheus’s “dear gaze” and his “God-taught strain” play
an equal part in bringing Eurydice back to life. Ultimately, though, it is music that saves
Eurydice, and sight that ruins her. When Pluto, “relenting to the strain,” allows Eurydice
to leave Hades he pronounces the “awful will” that Orpheus not turn back before the pair
has safely departed the underworld. This ultimatum brings Eurydice’s undoing: when
Orpheus, unable to resist, turns to her with “those eyes of fire” she is “lost, forever lost!”
The last half of the poem emphasizes aurality’s dominance in the abrupt (and
almost unmarked) switch from the speaker’s retelling of the tale to Eurydice’s own
voiced narration. At the end of the poem’s seventh stanza, the speaker, addressing
Eurydice directly, as she has throughout the poem, writes “Within thy soul I hear Love’s
eager voice replying—.” The next stanza then begins with Eurydice’s own exclamation
of “Play on, mine Orpheus!,” a narration which continues through the rest of the poem.
The speaker’s frame narrative thus functions to allow Eurydice, who in traditional
versions of the tale is a silent victim twice lost, a chance to tell the story from her own
perspective. Though at the mercy of Orpheus’s glance, Eurydice nonetheless has the
power of voice; she cannot undo Orpheus’s actions or their effects, but she can cast them
in her own light, as she exclaims in the final lines, “I faint! I die!—the serpent’s fang
once more/ Is here!—nay, grieve not thus! Life but not Love is over!” Eurydice succeeds
in resurrecting herself by insisting on the transcendence of love, and rewriting her own
story to reflect a truth that relies on more than material fact. Though Eurydice enters the
narrative through the reader of antique volumes, the resurrection that she engineers at the
end of the poem depends on no one but herself. In this alternate Pygmalion tale, Osgood
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represents Eurydice’s redemption in precisely a moment that the “antique story” fails to
record, and emphasizes the detrimental effects of the gaze—both Orpheus’s and by
extension, the reader’s.88
The pervasive skepticism about the world of appearances in late poems such as
“Eurydice” makes itself felt likewise in Poems (1850), which presents earlier work
through a lens of musicality and draws away from the intimate ties to audience that her
earlier work stresses. The prefatory apparatus of the volume goes to pains to distance
Osgood’s biographical self from her work, pulling back from the earlier intimacy with
readers that was explicit in A Wreath of Wild Flowers. The dedication begins on a note of
intimacy, reading “To Rusfus Wilmot Griswold, as a souvenir of admiration for his
genius, of regard for his generous character, and of gratitude for his valuable literary
counsels.” But on the very next page, the preface includes a much more cursory and
impersonal consideration of these same “literary counsels.” The selection of works in this
volume was made, Osgood notes, by an unnamed “literary friend,” and on looking over
the final collection, Osgood finds in it “some pieces which my mature taste would have
rejected…while others are omitted which I would more willingly have inserted.”
Griswold, in other words, might have “Genius” but even as her literary executor cannot
profess to speak for her taste. In “intrust[ing]” the selection of the volume to him, Osgood
ensures that it has the personal stamp of an “attached friend” even as its final form is
placed at a distance from her personal values and judgments. (We can only guess, of
course, which works are not up to her “maturer taste”). This distancing continues in the
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88
This dichotomy between aurality and visuality also emerges in “Ermengarde’s
Awakening,” another Graham’s poem, this one from August 1849. In this poem as in
“Eurydice,” references to Poe, Orpheus, and Pygmalion are entwined in a narrative that
follows the title character’s movement from material to spiritual love.
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next lines of the preface, as Osgood notes, “It is proper to observe, in explanation of the
character of some of the songs and other verses, that they were written to appear in prose
sketches and stories, and are expressions of feeling suitable to the persons and incidents
with which they were originally connected.” In linking the works to the feelings of
fictional characters, Osgood effectively distances them from her own, a move away from
the sort of biographical-poetic conflation of the periodical exchange. At the same time,
since she does not distinguish the particular works to which she refers, this personal
distance in practice applies to all of the book’s songs and verses. On this note, the
preface ends, fittingly not with the author’s signature, but with the date and place of
composition.
We see this dance between distance and intimacy similarly in the illustrations to
the volume. Poems is by far the most extensively illustrated edition of Osgood’s poems,
and the only one that prints engravings based on her husband’s paintings; S.S. Osgood is
the most well-represented artist in a collection that also includes designs by the likes of
F.O.C. Darley and G.H. Cushman. But this familial tie fails to make the personal appeals
that it might: not only is there no discussion of S.S. Osgood’s work in the textual
apparatus, but the titling of individual works pulls back from familial connections. We
see this clearly in a the picture titled “The Child’s Portrait,” which is labeled much more
tellingly just the next year in a memorial collection for Osgood, as “Portrait of Ellen
Frances Osgood.” In this image, the Osgoods’ eldest daughter, a toddler with shoulderlength hair, looks out intently at viewers with large dark eyes, while a small butterfly
perches on her right index finger. The vulnerability of the image is stressed by the child’s
bare shoulders and the vacant backdrop against which she stands, and matches the
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trepidations of its accompanying poem, “On Parting with an Infant’s Portrait,” which
considers a mother’s reluctance to send away a child’s image.
Like the impersonal titling of the image, though, Osgood’s revision to “On
Parting” show a pull back from personal engagement with her audience. The poem, as we
have already seen, considers the speaker’s temporary separation from the “fair image of
my fairer child” for the purposes of this engraving’s wider dissemination. But the poem
printed in the 1850 volume ends after the fourth stanza, on the lines “Gaze smiling into
stranger-hearts,/ And bid them bless my fairy girl!” As such, this edition of the poem
excises the last five stanzas from the A Wreath of Wild Flowers (1838) version, in which
the speaker implores the portrait to “win for [Osgood] that simple meed,/ For which his
spirit long has pined,--/Th’approving glance of critic-taste.” Perhaps these five stanzas
express what is no longer necessary: the reprinting of the child’s image in the elegant
volume is evidence enough that her mission has been fulfilled. The image stands in as
evidence of the favor of “critic-taste” that the intervening years have brought both
Osgoods, and personal appeals would appear out of place in such a late publication. But
Osgood’s emendations shift the meaning of the poem significantly, transforming its focus
from the speaker’s generous offering to her audience, to a mother’s worries at parting
with a precious possession. As such, these revisions mark the significant shift away from
audience in Osgood’s later work.
We see this shift clearly in another poem in the volume, “To S.S. Osgood.” In this
poem, Osgood the painter is cast in direct opposition to the artist in the early edition of
“On Parting with an Infant’s Portrait”: rather than pining for “Th’approving glance of
critic-taste,” this artist is “careless of what others call Renown,” and “disdains/ The
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common meed that genius earns of men.” Instead: “with rapt, thrill’d heart and eye,/ Thy
very life to thy loved task in thrall.” This image of the artist subjugates the end products
of composition to the inspired process: not only is the artist indifferent to his work’s
reception, but the poem itself is, as the subtitle tells us “Suggested by an Unfinished
Picture” of an unspecified subject. The artist is suspended within the process of creation,
“Kindling the canvas with thy soul,” a construction that suggests not only that the act of
creation more valuable than the material work or gains that it might bring (“praise or
gold”), but that the truly inspired creative process functions to consume the material endproduct. In offering his life to the work (rather than bringing the work itself to life)
Osgood marks the distinction of this artist from her earlier (audience-focused)
Pygamalion figures.
In fact, the idea of a “kindling” creativity directly recalls another late poem (this
one posthumously published) dedicated to Samuel Osgood, “The Artist in the Burning
Ship.” This poem centers on a biographical event in which the young Osgood witnessed
the ship on which he was a passenger struck by lightning, but the romantic vision of the
artist that follows is wholly out of proportion to this same biography. The emphasis on
the private and immaterial nature of this artist’s work is apparent from the last lines of the
poem:
And the boy lost his all in that wreck,
Yet he gave not a thought to his gold;
For he saved in his spirit that pageant of light,
And it lives there—a treasure untold. (The Odd Fellows’ Offering 2)
This artist’s work exists entirely in private memory, a “treasure untold.” Not only does it
not make appeals to its audience, but it has no discernable physical form with which to
make such appeals. This romantic representation is all the more striking given Samuel
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Osgood’s conventional career path as a portraitist to the gentry. The arc of Samuel’s
career during Fanny’s lifetime runs in almost entire opposition to Fanny’s late-life
representation of his ideals. Though of humble origins, Osgood gained notoriety for his
portraits of cultural celebrities such as Martin Van Buren and Davy Crockett—and
wealthy sitters such as the young Fanny Locke herself. By the end of Fanny’s life in
1849, as “one of America’s most prominent and successful portrait painters,” Samuel
traveled to California under the lure of the Gold Rush (Houston 50). He exchanged
painting for mining for some months, and by all accounts did well, earning enough
money to dabble in real estate speculation. When he returned to painting three months
later, it was, as a local newspaper article wrote, “with a well lined purse,” and with 24
property lots in Sacramento. His work by then commanded “California prices,” and his
letters show him to be far from indifferent to this salability. In a letter he notes that he
voted in the California elections for a recent sitter, Captain Sutter, “more from personal
feeling than any other, since he has been the means of my being some thousand dollars
richer than I should have been, had I not painted his portraits”(qtd. in Houston 51). And
in an anecdote that neatly contradicts the premise of “The Artist in the Burning Ship,”
Osgood’s apartment was in 1849 a victim of a fire that consumed dozens of buildings in
San Francisco and caused millions of dollars of damage. The painter managed to escape
with both a recently completed portrait and his summer’s earnings, even returning to the
burning building for a suitcase. This flouting of biographical truth in an apparently
biographical poem does not in itself represent a shift in Osgood’s canon, but her
emphasis in these changes on the private, anti-materialist artist do.
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Since this dance rejects the materiality of print that the figure of Pygmalion
represented for both Poe and Osgood, it is perhaps not surprising that where this figure
held dominance in the Poe-Osgood exchange, the trope of the song now comes to take its
place. Osgood was increasingly consumed by the idea of her verse as music; in
Griswold’s biographical sketch of her in The Memorial, he notes that on her death, she
was at work on a long blank verse poem “upon Music,” which caused her to judge “all
she had written of comparatively little worth”(24).89 Osgood’s poetry was increasingly
set to music by composers in the 1840s, and following her death, in the 1850s. One of
these composers was Herrmann Saroni, later the editor of Saroni’s Musical Times, an
influential New York weekly that covered music, literature and the fine arts from the late
1840s into the early 50s. Saroni set Osgood’s “Echo Song”—a central lyric from the
journal exchange, printed on the front page of the Broadway Journal and citing Poe’s
“Israfel”—to music in 1845, the same year that it was first published. In 1849, he
composed music for another of Osgood’s poems, “I Wandered in the Woodland.” His
journal became the first site of publication of two of Osgood’s works honoring Poe
shortly after his death: “A Dirge,” published in the October 13, 1849 edition, and
“Reminisces of Edgar A. Poe” for 8 December, 1849. (Pollin 27-32). Of these, “A Dirge”
is the most well-known, and in fact perhaps the most reprinted of Osgood’s works; it
appears as the final work in the 1850 Poems, under its more familiar title, “The Hand
That Swept the Sounding Lyre.”
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89
Ovid’s Orpheus makes the link between poetry, music and infatuation explicit,
through the Latin word “carmen,” translated alternately as “song,” “poem” or
“incantation”(Migraine-George 239).
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This poem, almost explicitly addressed to Poe, is a good example of the antimaterialist perspective on art in Osgood’s late work. The re-titling and organization of
this piece was likely done at the discretion of Griswold, who would later change the
masculine pronoun to a feminine on in another reprinting of the poem. In Poems, then,
“The Hand that Swept the Sounding Lyre” appears at the end of the section of the volume
designated as “Songs.” The grounds for titling the 113 poems in this section as such is
not explained within the editorial apparatus, but several of the works—such as “Happy at
Home,” “Call Me Pet Names, Dearest” and “I Wandered in the Woodland”—are among
those that are known to have been set to music. The organization, then, is at least to some
degree a pragmatic one, but also functions to distance the voice of the speaker from a
biographical persona. This distancing is compounded, in “The Hand that Swept the
Sounding Lyre,” with dematerialized artistic creation. The last stanza ends on this note:
Love’s silver lyre he play’d so well
Lies shatter’d on his tomb;
But still in air its music-spell
Floats on through light and gloom,
And in the hearts where soft they fell,
His words of beauty bloom
For evermore!
The image of the shattered object directly recalls this same trope as used in poems and
stories of the Poe-Osgood exchange, including “The Assignation,””Slander,” “To
Lenore” and “Ermengarde’s Awakening.” In all of these works, the broken object signals
the entrance into a different stage of life (or afterlife). Such a transition is clearly also at
work in this poem, and the persistence of song after the obliteration of its material source
also marks Osgood’s investment in a transcendent perspective on creation.
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At the same time, this poems references to the periodical exchange and its
seemingly obvious anchoring work to counter this aesthetic. The poem neatly illustrates
the difficulty of reading Osgood’s work throughout her career: while the canon is far
from transparently biographical, it is circularly referential, quoting both from within
Osgood’s own canon and from without. This quotation, like the quotation of the
periodical exchange, creates a narrative of its own, a story that while perhaps not quite
biographical, has touchstones in biography. The task of shoe-horning biography from
artistry in Osgood’s canon is notoriously difficult, and only exacerbated by the fact that
the most extensive account of her life that we have is the (questionably reliable) one of
Rufus Griswold, whose sketch in The Memorial is an extension of his review of her
Poems that appeared in the Home Journal earlier in the year. The sketch performs much
the same back-and-forth dance as Osgood’s final volume, alternately aligned and
distancing person and poetry. Griswold begins in tying life to work—“There was a very
intimate relation between Mrs. Osgood's personal and her literary characteristics.”(21)—
but then, in describing her frequently romantic subject matter, backs away from this
equation: “It is not to be supposed that all these caprices are illustrations of the
experiences of the artist, in the case of the poet any more than in that of the actor”(22). In
relation to the poems to her children, however, Griswold shows no such hesitation,
asserting that these works “admit us to the sacredest recesses of the mother’s heart”(28).
This ambivalence falls in contrast to the general sentiment toward Poe, whose work
critics made an almost painful effort to separate from life. Compare for instance these
somewhat contradictory statements on Osgood to this unambiguous statement in an
obituary sketch on Poe in Graham’s: “Now, in the case of Mr. Poe, we cannot in the least
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perceive that the defects of his private life had any connection at all with the
consideration of his works or of his genius”(“The Genius and Characteristics of the Late
Edgar Allan Poe” 218).
Tracing the myth of Pygmalion in Osgood and Poe’s work allows us to mark a
shifting attitude, albeit on a limited scale, toward the public/private world of print. That
the coming to life of the Pygmalion myth is so clearly tied in Osgood and Poe’s work to
print publishing—and its incumbent challenges, such as the professional networks of
publication and issues of reprinting and copyright—should encourage us to reevaluate the
nature of this myth’s nineteenth-century heyday. If the story of Galatea and Pygmalion
finds itself at the center of reinterpretation during this era of Ovid’s more general decline,
this interest speaks necessarily to the outlines of the tale, to its investment in following
the increasingly intimate relationship with increasingly accessible works of art. That
Osgood, in her own work, ultimately replaces this material intimacy with a more
ephemeral vision of art suggests that accessibility is followed by challenges, including
the brand of artistic celebrity that was on the rise by mid-century. Osgood may have
fostered a sense of intimacy with audience within the space of her artwork—but she saw
this sense of connection extend well into her personal life. Osgood’s late work attempts
to evade such connection to audience, but her memorialization speaks to the enduring
power that such bonds had to readers.
The Pygmalion myth, centered on the emotional bonds of art object and audience,
proved a fertile trope for readers’ reflections on Osgood’s legacy in the years following
her death. William Gillespie, for instance, contributed his poem, “Pygmalion,” to The
Memorial, a volume that was published in honor of Osgood shortly after her death.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne also chose a Pygmalion work for the memorial volume, “The Snow
Image: A Childish Miracle,” a story that considers the sculpting and coming-to-life of
“snow sister” by two young siblings, and her subsequent destruction by adult rationality
(45). And Sara Willis, a friend of Osgood’s who would attain literary celebrity after her
death under the pseudonym Fanny Fern, produced perhaps the most memorable tribute to
the poetess in her Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1854).
In an entry titled “Fanny Sargeant Osgood,” Willis records her visit to Osgood’s
grave in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in the year following her death. Astounded to find that
neither Osgood’s grave nor those of her daughters had been marked with a headstone,
Willis bemoans the poetess’s position of being “so soon forgotten by all the world!” Her
manner of memorializing Osgood to readers in the last lines of the passage is strikingly
redolent of the Pygmalion myth, and suggests the personally intimate relationship that
Osgood would continue to inspire in her readers after her death: “Poor, gifted, forgotten
Fanny! She ‘still lives’ in my heart; and, Reader, glance your eyes over these touching
lines, ‘written during her last illness,’ and tell me, Shall she not also live in thine?”(158).
What follows is Osgood’s “A Mother’s Prayer in Illness”(1848), the kind of seemingly
autobiographical lyric for which Osgood was best known, and which was particularly
poignant given both Osgood and her daughters’ recent deaths. Asking readers, then, to
“glance your eyes” over this poem, and to feel her come alive for them enacts the
intimate bonds of the Pygmalion myth, and grants readers the power to activate them.
Osgood’s late works—and even her final recorded word, “angell”—attempt to evade the
uncomfortable effects of such intimacy, but audiences would continue to remember their
own ability to look, and to bring to life.
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Epilogue
This dissertation highlights understudied ekphrastic works by popular nineteenthcentury writers, arguing that this genre of art description provides unique insight into
authorship and audience in an era of expanding literary production. The ekphrasis of print,
centered in an era when engravings were increasingly accessible to middle class readers,
imagines these readers as accompanying spectators, the sometimes unspoken but always
present third figures in the dialogue between writer and artwork. We see this attention to
audience in Sigourney’s lyrics, which are based on easily obtainable prints, or Sophia’s
Hawthorne’s travelogue, whose descriptions function to render more obscure works
equally available. Even Longfellow’s Michael Angelo, which seems initially a traditional
hagiography of the artist, is just as much about how others see the artist, and how
Longfellow’s contemporaries see the writer. Osgood’s early poetry too was deeply
invested in the role of literary audience in the coming to life of a work of art. The
difference that print makes, then, is in creating the assumption—founded or not—that the
reader too can “see” the image, and in making this shared spectatorship an important
component of the writing’s unfolding.
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It is with such a moment of shared spectatorship—this one from the twentieth
century—that W.J.T. Mitchell opens his essay “Ekphrasis and the Other,” taking the
popular radio comedy “Bob and Ray” as an example of the draw and difficulty of image
description. In this example, popular nineteenth-century ekphrasis seems the natural
precursor to the chummy image-sharing of the hosts, who invite their listeners to “see”
photographs from their summer vacations (Picture Theory 151). It also seems natural in
this context to understand this earlier popular canon as a forerunner to the “pictorial turn”
that Mitchell describes as beginning in the late nineteenth century with the advancement
of photo-technologies, experiments with film, and ultimately the advent of digital media.
If the twentieth century is, as Mitchell pronounces, the age in which reading and the text
lose their cultural dominance to sight and the image, it seems perfectly in line with this
construction to understand the earlier proliferation of print as feeding into this large-scale
shift (Picture Theory 11-34).
But I want to resist the inclination to pull back Mitchell’s “pictorial turn” another
50 years, or to see in the development of media any such sweeping cultural change. To
claim any age as particularly “imagistic” in contrast to any other, is, as Mitchell himself
has written after his term gained broad currency, something of a compelling fallacy. The
image, in its various forms, has been an important artifact of every historical era, and
pegging one period as “textual” and another as “pictorial” may be unproductively
divisive (Holly and Moxey 240). In this dissertation, I have focused not on broad shifts
from verbal to visual cultures, but on more specific changes within visual media. These
seemingly small changes, I argue, make an important difference in the way that visual
work is represented.
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In thinking about ekphrasis, medium matters. Nowhere is this more apparent than
in looking at the ekphrasis of the nineteenth century against that of earlier and later
periods. Compare for instance Washington Allston’s polished sonnets on works including
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and Rembrandt’s Jacob’s Dream to the popular
ekphrasis from later in the same century. Allston’s stylistic influences are clearly
European, and his writing follows to same Neoclassical ideals of aesthetic unity as his
carefully balanced history paintings. Allston’s poetry, his titling makes clear, is inspired
not by reproduction but by the same artistic travels that provided him with his artistic
training. One picture, he specifies, is “in the Institute at Bologna,” another “in the
Vatican.” A poem that seems clearly to describe Rubens’s The Landing of Marie de
Medici at Marseilles is titled simply as “Sonnet on the Luxemburg Gallery.” Allston’s
sonnets are concise records of the aesthetic lessons that he has learned from individual
artworks in these particular locations. The imagined audience of Allston’s poems consist
of the master artists that he emulates, not a broader antebellum public (Allston 149-153).
The ekphrasis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is equally influenced by
its media and points of access. With the founding of major public collections in the late
twentieth century and into the early twentieth, much Modernist ekphrastic work was
centered in the museum, from Marianne Moore’s natural history exhibits to W.B Yeats’s
Municipal Gallery poems. Other works depended on the close associations between
visual artists and poets; Frank O’Hara’s poem “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington
Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art” as well as O’Hara and Rivers’
collaborative work is illustrative of such personal ties. And the development of the media
that inspired the phrase “pictorial turn”—photography, film, and digital media—have
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prompted their own ekphrastic work. John Hollander notes that the use of photographs as
ekphrastic subjects may have begun with Melville’s Battle Pieces, but grew exponentially
into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, poets from Hart Crane to Anne Carson have
looked to film for inspiration. The variety of these media, and the ways that they are
experienced, all make a difference for the way that art description works.
The central difference that print makes in nineteenth-century ekphrasis lies, as I
have argued throughout, in its appeals to audience. But other common points also stand
out, suggesting new directions for exploration in nineteenth-century art description. For
one, the availability of engravings has the effect of flattening art history, particularly in
an American context where there is little general access to original works. Ekphrasis is
imagistic, but also essentially historical, reflecting back both the era in which it is written
and the era of the scenes that it records. For writers such as Sigourney, who mined
historical biography for didactic anecdotes for her students, or Henry Longfellow, for
whom history was a grab-bag of styles and postures that could be easily adapted to suit
the moment, ekphrasis was also a means of tapping into these varied historical moments.
And it was print that granted these moments their easy immediacy, translating them into
the present of the periodical. Because nineteenth-century ekphrasis allows for a present in
which the past was always superimposed and transparently accessible, the function of this
work is more than simply to think about the place of images, or even, as I have been
arguing, the place of audience in literary culture. Instead, ekphrasis functions as a means
of showing American readers what they might become, much as Thomas Cole’s The
Course of Empire series sketches out a dystopian American future through a GrecoRoman past. If print culture places descriptive writing and artistic engravings in direct
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juxtaposition, so too does it place side by side the stories that we tell about the past and
those that we tell about the present.
The very ubiquity of text and image also begs the question of the continuing
relevance of the term “ekphrasis” to this form of writing. Critical definitions of ekphrasis
are notoriously contentious, and much of the early nineteenth-century ekphrasis that I
have examined in the course of this dissertation only includes moments that describe
works of art in the context of longer sections that are not strictly ekphrastic. And, as I
have stressed throughout, during the early nineteenth century art writing more
generally—including art reviews and designated art journals—was in a period of
expansion. If Mitchell and James Heffernan’s definitions of ekphrasis do not work with
nineteenth-century popular print, that is to some degree because ekphrasis as a theoretical
term has grown up around a specific set of Romantic and Modernist writers. This
dissertation has focused primarily on thinking about what it would look like to take what
we know of ekphrasis and apply it more inclusively to other canons. But it might also be
worth thinking about other points of access. To place these works in their contemporary
contexts would mean thinking more about Sigourney in terms of Hemans, more about
Sophia Hawthorne in terms of the art descriptions in other travelogues, and more about
writers like Margaret Fuller in terms of contemporary art journals like The Crayon or the
Cosmopolitan Art Journal. This dissertation aims to provide an opening for such
contextualized historical ekphrasis within the still largely unexplored field of nineteenthcentury American art writing.
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